Updating The Personal Terms of Service For Your Life

Summary: This is the time of year when a lot of technology companies update their products. Maybe you’ve noticed. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and many others have all issued significant updates to their products in the last month or so. Sure, they may issue bug fixes and feature updates here and there during the year, but these are the big ones, the ones that go from version 10 to version 11, not 10.15.9 or something of that sort. These are the updates that make a difference. What’s not terribly surprising is that along with these updates come changes in the Terms of Service agreements that companies are required to post. You have to accept the Terms of Service in order to install and use the software. There’s no getting around it. Even companies that may not be issuing updates are getting in on the act. The company that makes my cell phone issued an update to their Terms of Service this morning. No update, mind you. We’ve already had several this year so perhaps their development team is a little weary. The Terms of Service updated, though, and yes, I’ve read the small print. What, you don’t read all that small print in the Terms of Service agreements? You’re not alone. Few people do. In fact, companies bank on the fact that <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/01/28/not-reading-the-small-print-is-privacy-policy-fail/4565274002/">less than ten percent of their users</a>, sometimes less than three percent, actually read what amounts to a legally binding contract. Most of the time, as long as everything goes well and neither you nor the company is up to no good, we’re safe. Few companies set out to deliberately harm their user base. There are exceptions, though, and there are frequently paragraphs and phrases dropped in the middle of all the legal speak that have the potential to cause trouble for someone down the road. For example, if you use a Samsung product, such as one of their cell phones, the <a href="https://terms.account.samsung.com/contents/legal/usa/eng/general.html">Terms of Service</a> includes this lovely bit of information: When you share content, you continue to own the intellectual property rights to your content and you are free to share the content with anyone else however you would like. However, to use your content in our Services, you need to grant us a license for any content that you create or upload using our Services. When you upload, transmit, create, post, display, or otherwise provide any information, materials, documents, media files, or other content on or through our Services (“User Content”), you grant us an irrevocable, unlimited, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, edit, distribute, translate, publish, publicly perform, and publicly display such User Content (“User Content License”) to the full extent allowed by Applicable Law. Do you see what they did there? In one sentence, they say that the content you create is yours, you retain the copyright, and Samsung can’t use it without a license from you. In the very next sentence, you grant them that license to use anything you upload using their device. The license is “irrevocable, unlimited, worldwide,” and “royalty-free.” That means you can’t take anything back, they can use it anytime, anywhere, for any reason, and you can’t charge them for it. All those pictures of your child’s third birthday? They can use them. That embarrassing video of you throwing up on the shoes of some D-level celebrity? Yeah, they can sell that to the tabloids and you won’t see a dime or even get any credit. And those nudes you’ve been sending to that person you really like? Yeah, someone else is looking at those, too.

Updating The Personal Terms of Service For Your Life

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