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posted by
Dopefish
on Monday February 24 2014, @05:00PM
from the don't-click-ok-to-accept-the-eula dept.
from the don't-click-ok-to-accept-the-eula dept.
andrew writes:
"Alternet.org reports recent updates to terms of conditions for Bank of Americas cell phone app and Capital Ones new credit card contract have given banks unsettling new abilities. These privileges include the authority to access to your phone microphone and camera or even showing up at your workplace and home unannounced at any time.
From the the article:
We're witnessing a new era of fascism, where corporations are creating intrusive and over-bearing terms and conditions that customers click to agree to without even reading.
As a result, corporations in America have acquired king-like power, while we're the poor serfs that must abide by their every rule or else."
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Have Terms of Service Become Totalitarian Tools?
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TWiTfan on Monday February 24 2014, @05:07PM
Yeah, who needs stuff like a bank account and internet service anyway? We'll live off the land, we will!
If real life were like D&D, my Charisma score would be a negative number
(Score: 1) by Blackmoore on Monday February 24 2014, @05:25PM
...yes.. there is only one option to bank at of course..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rune of Doom on Monday February 24 2014, @05:39PM
If Capital One gets away with this (which it probably will) expect other banks to follow. The entire US system (I'm uncertain what to call it, 'terminal capitalism'?) is building to a point of maximizing non-productive wealth-extraction and rent seeking at a cost of (among other things) ensuring that there are no alternatives and no graceful failure modes. Without major changes, the United States is heading for a hard crash. Not in the immediate future (the equivalent of spit and baling wire can keep things running for a long time: look at the Roman Empire) but eventually, and when it comes it is going to be horrendous beyond the imagination of 99.99% of Americans.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by sfm on Monday February 24 2014, @06:32PM
Publishing this info will help make people aware of the TOS details. This is the first step convincing them to change.
It stands to reason that they want people to use their App. If the install base fails to grow, it
is possible BOA will re-evaluate.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday February 24 2014, @08:01PM
I'll bet you where this is all going - we'll probably see emergence of debtors' prisons with in the U.S. in another twenty years. And you bet your asses you'll be working that debt off, being paid at a rate so low that not even Chinese labor could compete with yours.
Too lazy to read the actual terms of service but I suspect that there are ways around it. If you can get the service without installing the app, then don't install the app and instead do your online banking through the mobile browser. Alternately, tell them you don't have a phone. Assuming you aren't trying to gain anything super-important (big loans/mortgages etc.), you could lie about your information and say that you "just moved," give a spam e-mail address, and for fuck's sake do not ever reveal your employer. Finally, if they send somebody to your door to enlighten you about a new service or a late payment, scream "rape!" and kick their guts in after a tazing or perhaps a heapin' helpin' of pepper-spray.
(Score: 4, Informative) by song-of-the-pogo on Monday February 24 2014, @08:43PM
In fact [wikipedia.org], they're [cbsnews.com] already [salon.com] here [thinkprogress.org].
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
(Score: 0) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 24 2014, @08:56PM
Rent-Seeking Behavior in the Global Technology Economy
Did you get your job, or if you are a hiring manager, did you go through a third-party recruiting agency?
Someone like Manpower Professional, Kelly IT, or Oxford Global Resources?
You will be happy to know that Yahoo Finance quite clearly shows that the vast majority of the business expenses of the publicly-traded "body shops" is due to sales.
That is, if you hired me through Manpower Professional, then at the going rate - sometimes it is more - if I'm still on the job after three months, you will pay Manpower Professional thirty percent of my first year's salary. If I'm a contract programmer, then you will pay Manpower Professional thirty percent of my hourly pay, FOR THE ENTIRE TIME I WORK FOR YOU!
Manpower Professional will then blow most of that money on cold-calling other hiring managers, as well as looking for online resumes just like mine [warplife.com] that are available free of charge, gratis, no commission required, at but the touch of an "I'm Feeling Lucky Button". If the recruiter does find a resume like mine, they will proceed to spam me mercilessly with such gems as the following, which I received not twenty minutes ago:
WUT?
I am not fucking kidding.
Because the candidate and the client are contractually forbidden from discussing headhunter commissions with each other, quite frequently those commissions are quite a lot more than the alleged "going rate" of thirty percent. Such was the case with some poor fuck, who reported to alt.computer.consultants.moderated his dismay at discovering that while he was paid what he felt was a reasonable thirty dollars an hour, his agency was billing the client ninety dollars per hour, then keeping the difference of sixty!
I am quite determined to put the entire, world-wide recruiting industry completely out of work. The way I'm going to do it is based on the method I used to come up with Find A Computer Job In Santa Cruz [warplife.com].
That is a HUGELY popular page, and has been since 1997. One time a complete stranger mailed me a gift certificate for $100.00, for my favorite restaurant, as that page helped him find a job.
I realized recently that there are very few recruiting agencies in Santa Cruz, and that the few that are there, such as Armada Software or the former SurfSoft, are quite a lot more ethical than the rest.
So I now have a placeholder [warplife.com] that I will fill in with every software employer on the whole fucking planet.
However it is quite obvious I need to develop an automated way of researching the links. I am working on that even as we speak.
I have a major product announcement [warplife.com] coming 5:01 PM 2014-03-21 EST.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 24 2014, @10:11PM
I want to see the temporary "services" shut down. I'll give you an additional reason to do so:
ILLEGAL ALIEN WORKERS are farmed out through the Manpower office here where I live. The staff at Manpower is exclusively Mexican. Mexicans are given preferential treatment in job placement. The company that I work for has employed mostly Mexicans for the past two decades. Manpower actively assists the illegals in working around documentation requirements. My bosses cooperate fully with those efforts, by changing names, SSN, and other personal information for illegal employees.
Phone calls, snail mail, and emails to INS, then to ICE, have resulted in no action.
Due to incompetent management, the company has recently gone bankrupt, and the plant has been bought up by an international mega-corporation. The illegals no longer have a home here. Drug testing and strict accountability for documentation has run off about 2/3 of the workforce.
Funny thing is - those jobs that Americans are to lazy to do? There are Americans doing them today.
Shut down the temporary services, and one HELL of a lot of illegals will be weeded out of the work force!
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:47AM
It is quite common for recruiter inquiry emails not to ask me if I am a US Citizen or permanent resident, but instead to ask my visa status. So they are just assuming I'm on an H1-B or some other temporary work permit.
Go have a peek at the slashdot article from this afternoon, about the widespread fraud in india, that is preying on Indian citizens by selling them fraudulent visas.
After a lot of consideration, I've decided I'm completely cool with outsourcing coding work to India. I should know, I've been hungry, broke and homeless. It just has to suck to be a dalit, but even untouchables can get computer science degrees. More power to 'em.
But building a software industry in india will ultimately be to america's benefit. Not so bring in an H1-B under fraudulent pretenses, when you could have hired a US citizen.
My own observation is that H1-Bs are employed not so much to save money, but to enable wage slavery. I have a real good friend, a top quality coder, who is a UK citizen. When he and I worked at the same company, I was treated like royalty, but he was kicked in the teeth on a daily basis. However he was paid the same as I was.
It's just that he did not have the option of resigning. He would not have been deported exactly, but he would have been obligated to leave the US until he obtained another work permit.
You could really help a brother out, where you to dig up the links to as many legitimate software employers as you possibly can, then mail them to me at mdcrawford@gmail.com I've been researching them myself. Just tonight I came up with a better way to research them, but it will be a week or two before I can code it up.
I plan to create something like Find a Computer Job in Santa Cruz [warplife.com], but for the whole fucking planet.
I observed about a year ago, that recruiting firms have never done very well in santa cruz since I put that page up back in 1997. At one time there were several of them, but now I only know of Armada Software, which is actually quite cool as headhunters go. Very ethical. Most aren't.
I have a major product announcement [warplife.com] coming 5:01 PM 2014-03-21 EST.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Cactus on Monday February 24 2014, @05:44PM
Luckily, there are plenty of options for financial services for (most) people. Unfortunately, there are many services where people do not have the benefit of choice. Broadband internet service is the first thing that comes to mind. Unless you count dial-up as an option many people don't have much choice in a provider.
janrinok does have a point though. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Nobody needs the Angry Birds expansion #28, and if you agree to the TOS it's your own damned fault. Unless a much larger portion of the general population begins to reject goods/services based on the fine print, companies will keep taking more and more.
The dollar you spend, (coupled with your personal info, now) is really the only kind of direct vote you have in such matters. Take care how you spend it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by biff on Monday February 24 2014, @05:46PM
It's great while there's a choice, but when this transitions from an overreach by one organization to standard terms across the industry...?
I thought bandwidth caps were a terrible idea, too. But when one business starts doing this and there's no regulatory pushback, if there's any boost in revenue or perceived reduction in liability there's really nothing stopping this idea from spreading. Unless you've figured out how to get the average consumer to follow a boycott; there are services and products I don't buy out of principle, but like voting the only benefit is the illusion I have some say in the process.
(Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Monday February 24 2014, @08:48PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday February 24 2014, @09:52PM
That is, if I had an account at Bank of America, I could use a Wells Fargo ATM to withdraw cash from my Bank of America account, and there was no charge to me.
Nowadays, I would pay Wells Fargo as much as three dollars per withdrawal. Quite often BofA would charge me too.
Automated Teller Machines were ALL free of charge for quite a long time, seeing as how they enabled live, human tellers to quit their jobs of dreary servitude to devote themselves to lives of leisure and creative pursuits.
But then some bank got the bright idea to charge $1.50 or so to withdraw cash from accounts at other banks. Almost overnight, all the banks followed suit.
Now it is quite common even for banks to limit the number of withdrawals from their own ATMs. Go over that monthly limit and you start paying fees.
I have a major product announcement [warplife.com] coming 5:01 PM 2014-03-21 EST.
(Score: 1) by ikanreed on Monday February 24 2014, @05:50PM
There certainly aren't any where you can freely negotiate your terms, which would be the case if respecting choice were an actual consequence of the economic system we have in the US.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 24 2014, @06:40PM
Oligopolies don't work that way, where switching sellers necessarily solves your problem.
Let's say that Company A does something that hurts consumers. That leaves Company A's competitor B with two options to react to improve their bottom line:
i. Do the same thing to reap the same benefits.
ii. Try to pull customers away from Company A by not introducing the identical section.
Most of the time, B will copy A, for 3 reasons:
1. Most of Company A's customers won't even notice the change, much less react to it.
2. The potential profits whatever action Company A took are frequently higher than could be gained by pulling in more customers.
3. Choosing to compete on this will get Company A's lawyers busy trying to find a way to go after Company B.
It's far easier for both A and B to simply hurt the third party (consumers) and leave each other alone. Multiply this by, say, 10 competitors, and it's very possible that industries will get steadily more onerous and more painful for consumers to deal with. And if it's an industry with a high enough initial capital cost, then it's extremely difficult for a new competitor to join the industry to take advantage of this situation to build a new customer base - and once it becomes a big player, guess what it does next?
Cell phone carriers, ISPs (in those rare places with more than one), and airlines are just a few examples of industries where this phenomenon is common.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by chewbacon on Monday February 24 2014, @09:58PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 24 2014, @10:25PM
Don't get me wrong: I fully support consumers making choices that get them better deals. My point is that while that is good and necessary, it's not always sufficient.
For example, banks didn't back down over ATM fees, and as a result they are pretty much industry standard, and there are now ATM companies that make their living from those fees.
Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Monday February 24 2014, @06:59PM
You don't need to bank with this particular bank, tell them why you are leaving, and then take your money elsewhere.
It's always my fault...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by LowID on Tuesday February 25 2014, @04:24AM
What God is that, when the 'elsewhere' bank has the same crappy TOS in place?
(Score: 1) by LowID on Wednesday February 26 2014, @08:56AM
s/God/good/