Terms of Service (TOS) Under Scrutiny - Part IV - Companies Used to Demand You Don't Criticise Their Products and Services
YESTERDAY we published Part III - Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act. There will be a lot more about that later (real-world examples). Because first we move on to "Consumer Review Fairness Act", which was recently explained in a presentation (very recently!), as follows:
Consumer Review Fairness Act
Prohibits companies from using contract provisions that restrict a person’s ability to review a company’s products or services, impose penalties for reviews, or require people to give up intellectual property rights to their reviews.
Companies were including a clause for “no bad reviews”. If the end user agreed to these terms and had a discovered bad review, their service would be terminated or at least the company had a legal right to terminate services. So much easier than the company filing a DMCA notification as they previously would try to "silence the critics".
Forcing no bad review gives an unfair advantage to a service. Transparency and honest reviews can help a software tool/utility/application to improve. Rather than be transparent and see this as an opportunity for improvement, companies are censoring anyone who posts a bad review?
When we censor, we cannot see the issue and work to fix or resolve. Users are not offered the opportunity for a better experience and features. There are many other reasons to not censor your users under threat of banning/kicking but this does impact the progression of the app and possibly future or similar technologies. Honestly seems like a bad business move.
Well, as far as bad reviews go, write and post away! Restricting speech with regard to criticism is no longer allowed in terms of service.
How many people bothered to read before signing or pressing away ("OK", "I accept", "fine, I accept changes to the terms of service")?
Don't let the world be run by mischievous corporate lawyers.
At the very least we must educate people about what they consent to. They might even consent to illegal terms or ignorantly consent to terms that are not legally enforceable. █