#Terms of service

[embodiedfutures]

UPDATE! REBLOG THIS VERSION!

[anarchopuppy]

[prokopetz]

People getting mad about Firefox switching to using hardware acceleration for video playback because they think "hardware acceleration" is a form of DRM is basically the browser equivalent of people freaking out because some random social media platform's terms of service says they own your posts, then when you read what the ToS in question actually says it's literally just "you grant us the right to show your posts to other people".

[odinsblog]

If you're on Twitter/X, you may have noticed a sudden stream of high-profile accounts heading for the exits. And no, it's not (just) about the election.

This exodus is thanks to a new Terms of Service document, which takes effect on November 15. Although the company isn't talking about it, the new ToS gives owner Elon Musk the right to use your tweets, photos and videos to train his AI bot, Grok.

The option to opt out of Grok training, something users currently have, may still exist in your settings the following day. But it also may not matter, legally speaking. Nothing about opting out is mentioned in the document you are required to sign. And it doesn't appear to make a difference if your account is locked: So far as this ToS is concerned, Grok gets to feed on it anyway.

Oh yes, and following free speech is no longer free. You'll be on the hook for $15,000 in damages if your account accesses more than a million tweets a day. Not even the hardest of hardcore Twitter junkies will reach that number, but many researchers do. For anyone who tracks hate speech on X, this will have a chilling effect. The Knight Institute for the First Amendment at Columbia University calls it a "disturbing move" for a supposed free-speech advocate.

Disagree with anything in this document, or any other changes going forward? According to the ToS, your only legal recourse is to fight the world's richest man in one court in rural Texas, many miles from X HQ in Austin. This happens to be a court where a judge who may still own a pile of Tesla stock has already given Musk favorable rulings.

Don't want Elon Musk to feed your feed to his pet AI? There is, alas, only one way out of it now: delete your account.

(continue reading)

[lemonseedy]

Hey now what in the damn fuck is this

[definetly]

Mozilla Firefox has started sharing and selling your data and has now implemented a terms of service.

TL;DR: Mozilla has done the following to Firefox (edit)

They removed from their FAQ a statement that they'd never sell or collect your data. (So much for "never")

For the first time ever, they added a Terms of Use for Firefox which includes the ability to bar you from using Firefox for any reason by adding a Termination clause to their new Terms of Use.

Mozilla claims that there they're changing the language of 'selling of data' to avoid potential lawsuits due to "the broad and vague language of 'data selling'"; which could legitimately be true.

Alternatives

If you want a good alternative that doesn't do that, try out LibreWolf, a more private fork of Firefox, or LadyBird, which doesn't include clode from other browser.

Librewolf:

Ladybird

[the-delta-42]

Found out that asking for prompts is against AO3's terms of service. Given that my What Ifs are basically requests from my readers, I'm trying to come to terms with that I'm breaking the rules of AO3.

[manlysun]

???

Tumblr is such a confusing place. I don't understand how I'll see posts with thousands of likes that feature full-blown nudity or even blatant porn and they're fine, not taken down or marked as sensitive material. But when I post something that follows the terms of service, it gets flagged. Is it cause I'm not a big blog or something like that? It's so frustrating.

[bisexualbaker]

Back on the 2018, Tumblr had that porn ban, and a lot of people fled to Dreamwidth. How many are still active, I couldn't tell you, but at the time some purity culture jackass asked in the comments of the official News post welcoming Tumblrites:

"So you allow pornographic images here and you're proud of that fact?"

Site co-founder and co-owner Denise replied:

We sure do and we sure are! That sounds like I'm being flippant, but the question of "what is pornography" has been, for hundreds of years, the tool used by societies, governments, and corporations as an excuse to censor and suppress anyone who doesn't match the societally-accepted attitudes on gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and sexual expression. Because of how "societally-accepted attitudes on etc etc" are formed, "pornography" as a label falls disproportionately on minority populations and their cultural practices and the cultural, social, and legal penalties for producing "pornography" follow. US judicial precedent, for years, defined obscenity primarily by the classic "I'll know it when I see it" -- that is, personal, subjective opinion. (Today's definition of obscenity that's replaced it is less pithily-summarized but equally personal and subjective; one of the three elements for a judicial ruling of obscenity specifically includes community standards, although nobody has ever defined the "community" involved, and so it is equally subjective and equally inequitably-enforced; in practice, it's been impossible to get a conviction for obscenity in the US in years, precisely because of the vagueness of the definition.) Our goal from the beginning was to remove as many subjective judgement calls from ToS enforcement procedures as we could, because subjective judgement calls, especially on adult-content related issues, lead to the burden of enforcement primarily landing against those who are gender/gender-identity/gender-expression and sexuality minorities, such as LGBT folks, trans folks, gender non-conforming folks, sex workers, and the like. We sidestep all that by saying, flat-out, that with certain limited exceptions that are necessary to preserve the quality of the service for everyone, such as spam cleanup, it's okay to post here unless it's inherently illegal under US law. This undoubtedly includes a lot of content that people think shouldn't be allowed to post, but everyone's line for "people shouldn't be able to post this!" falls differently, and by outsourcing our particular definitions to "inherently illegal under US law", it lets us have a single standard that involves very few subjective elements.

So if you're wondering about Dreamwidth's content hosting restrictions, there you have it.

[netscapenavigator-official]

Every single day I wish Mastodon would’ve won the Twitter Migration over Bluesky.

[riphimopen]

terms of Service dont suck me off, dont jack me off, dont whack me off, dont fuck me off, dont shake me off, dont flip me off, dont throw me off, dont shove me off, dont blow me off, dont push me off, dont piss me off AND DONT EVEN THINK ABOUT FREAKING ME OUT

[onlytiktoks]

I don't know how accurate their information about Facebook messenger is, but Instagram (Facebook owned) had a college kid arrested for PRIVATE messages over a joke...

[prokopetz]

Today's aesthetic: alarmist posts about social media terms of service which wildly misconstrue completely reasonable clauses (e.g., of course you're granting them a license to modify, reproduce and distribute your posts – they wouldn't be allowed to show them to other people if you didn't!) while completely ignoring the clauses that are genuinely alarming (e.g., go look up what "indemnity" means).

[greatrunner]

Thinking about how US Americans are being banned from xiaohongshu/red note for not reading or abiding by the TOS and community guidelines (+ posting things explicitly censored by the Chinese govt), and how much that attitude translates into the actual enforcement (or Lackthereof) of TOS/CG/TAC on social websites in the US unless the act is politically motivated.

Tumblr repeatedly fails to protect people from harassment and dogpiling, but the moment someone says something funny about the head of the website, their account gets nuked. You can be violently racist on AO3 despite the platform modeling itself as a 'safe space' for marginalized persons.

It would certainly explain why so many spaces on the internet lack genuine accountability, and how everything effectively becomes politicized to the point of making guideline violations a matter of opinions you disagree on, lest you be accused of censorship yourself.

[inexorableone]

Colorful picture of 13 years old Jill in Tumblr searching #transformers, but instead alien robots sees naked trans people pictures bot spams 24/7: