When was the last time you clicked ‘Yes’ to ‘I Agree to the Terms and Condition’? Who reads those things anyway, right? And it’s way easier to just scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘I Agree’ just to get beyond this annoying page. Well as it turns out, you could be signing away your soul.
Wait. What? You read that right. According to the BBC, some companies are now adding a clause into their T&C which gives “legal ownership of their customer’s soul”.
Just look at what happened to Jen Palmer. A few years ago, she and her husband placed an order with an online retailer. When they didn’t receive their order after 30 days, the couple requested a refund from Paypal, and Jen posted a negative review of the company on the consumer website Ripoff Report. Three years later, they were fined $3,500 for violating the terms and conditions of the sale which included a non-disparagement clause preventing customers from “taking any action that negatively KlearGear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees. Read A Case For Reading the Small Print.
As the article points out, all sorts of things can be lurking in the small print. And since most of us don’t read them anyway, we might as well be signing away our souls. As one commentator points out, T&C contracts are structured in such a way that the consumer either has to accept it all or reject it all, leaving many with no choice but to accept it if we want to use that product or service.
So it appears that whether or not you spend half a day reading that 20-page document, you could still end up agreeing to things you’re not entirely comfortable with.
Legal ownership to what?!? These corporations have definitely gone too far with this one. What does people’s soul have to do with purchasing a piece of fabric from a company or installing their proprietary software. Fool dem a tek people for. Disgusting!