We should each take privacy seriously, even online, and there is a distinction between privacy and security. The latter is a choice, the former is a right. Despite that it is not feasible for most people to read the terms and conditions for the online services which they use, especially when these terms of service weigh in with multiple tens of thousands of words per document.
Private text messages aside, who really cares about data privacy, right? If your photos, contacts, calendar, email, browsing history, search history, musical tastes, files, thousands of status updates, likes, shares and physical movements are all in the cloud, who really cares?
Please read that last paragraph again and let it sink in – that is probably more data than your nearest and dearest have about you. Yet generally speaking, people don’t seem to be concerned that such volumes of data are out there and being used without our consent.
PayPal’s terms and conditions are longer than Hamlet! The vast majority of people will not have the time, or inclination, to read and decipher thousands of words in legalese to work out where their data is going. Ipso facto, this data is being shared without our consent, regardless of whether we have accepted the terms and conditions or not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @10:21PM
Replying to a buried comment here asking if you have to be able to read a contract for it to be enforceable.
A year or two ago the Arizona Legislature deemed that smart contracts are legal agreements so long as the code is made available in some form before the contract is executed by its users. This would be the case regardless of if you could read or understand what you are reading. These laws were passed to prevent problems like what happened with the DAO on Ethereum. Therefore if you can codify a contract in actual source code it would be enforceable at least in Arizona and as of this year, Wyoming as well. So the requirement that a person be able to read and understand a contract seems to not be applicable so long as steps are taken to affirm & execute the contract.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84f45611-8280-4351-847b-31a9021a9709 [lexology.com]
This does beg a question though. If a smart contract requires a blockchain to be validated (because the blockchain is considered business records under all of these laws), what are the legal ramifications to downloading blockchains that have illegal and unsavory content, i.e. content that would otherwise be illegal to download?