REAL LIFE NEWS: WHY YOU SHOULD READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS
by Hazed
When you click the little ticky box to say you agree to the terms and conditions of some software, do you know what you are signing up to? Probably not, because nobody ever actually reads the t&cs, do they?
To prove this, wifi company Purple, which offers wifi hotspots to various restaurants and other businesses, included a sneaky clause into their terms and conditions – and 22,000 punters signed up. Those people are now legally bound to perform 1,000 hours of community service, including such delightful tasks as cleaning toilets, scraping chewing gum off the streets and “manually relieving sewer blockages”. Yuk!
The terms also included an offer of a prize to anyone who actually read them and noticed the “community service clause”. Just one person spotted it and claimed the prize.
We hope Purple doesn’t decide to hold its customers to the terms they unwittingly signed up to – although it would be a novel way of dealing with the ongoing problem of chewing gum stuck to pavements.
It’s a fun experiment but I am sure reading this story won’t make any of you read the terms and conditions in future.
