this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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I looked at the terms of service and noticed that they bind you into arbitration, limit your terms to $100, mandate you to travel to Delaware for dispute, and force you into mass arbitration if your dispute is similar to others.
Pass
While I understand that, I'm in America. My first priority has to be getting people off of Twitter.
Would I prefer open source, non-profit software? 100%. It's the smarter and better choice for so many reasons.
But if Bluesky is going to gain critical mass, I'm not going to fight it. I'm having a hard enough time getting people off Twitter. I've written the media address of environments I'm familiar with asking them to organize a move, and I mentioned both Bluesky and Mastodon.
Unfortunately that's standard for pretty much every service in existence until the government determines otherwise or the users demand it en masse. No company is going to willingly expose themselves to any more risk than they absolutely have to. There's zero benefit to them.
Let's not call disabling the right to sue a "business risk". That's like calling the right to stop paying for the service a "risk" - it's riskdiculous.
By "business risk", they just mean bad for the business, ethics aside
Yes that's what they mean. I tried to persuade against meaning that.
...and why not?
But...that's what it is? I promise if they could remove that risk with a few words in the TOS, and it was legal, they'd all be doing that too.
The right to take legal action for harm done is imperative. It's importance is diminished if conflated with a legitimate business risk (like research and development). It should be illegal to deny it.
I agree. But we weren't discussing hypotheticals, we were discussing reality.
And we should just accept that?
Doesn't matter if you should or not. Point is you accept it or you don't use any service whatsoever.
Looks like there's a viable alternative here.
Really? Who are you going to sue here? And how much money do you think you can sue them for?
Oh no, there's no money or profit motive here. I guess that's terrible.
That's not what I asked.
I don't think forced arbitration has really been tried in court. I remember Disney kind of trying, but it was completely unrelated (e.g. argued that arbitration agreement from Disney+ applied to issues on physical Disney properties).
In order to hold up in court, the contract needs to reasonably benefit both parties instead of only the contract issuer. So there's a very good chance a court will dismiss the forced arbitration clause, especially if it's just in a EULA and not a bidirectional contract negotiation.
That said, I tend to avoid services with binding arbitration statements in their EULA, and if I can't, I avoid companies that force acceptance of EULA changes to continue use of the service.
Well I know someone tried it against Valve and they ended up removing the requirement.
Funny, someone shared an article in another post about all corporate money going to Delaware, https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/
Arbitration of what? It's a free service. What money could they possibly owe you?
You're not thinking evil enough, honestly. Two examples off the top of my head, each being fairly innocent mistakes: If you enter your phone number for 2FA, it's not going to be public-facing. It's their responsibility to keep that information private from internal and external threats. Ok, so what if it leaks... right? Oh, it turns out the hacker SIM swapped your phone number for the 2FA, and did a password reset on your account via support chat. Still no big deal, its just social media... Except you've been giving updates to all your patreon backers on your project that's shipping soon. It suddenly vanishes off the internet, replaced with a crypto scheme, and all your supporters just flooded your bank with chargebacks. Your attempts at getting your account back are met with silence and your supporters are now furious. Was any of that your fault? No. You get $100.
Let's try another example: Bounty programs are used by companies to collect bugs and other possibly exploits so they can be fixed. "Too expensive, nobody will know if there's a bug anyway." So the app on Google Play store gets installed by 30 million users with a critical flaw... if a very specific image is opened in it, the phone bricks. All the news sites cover the bug, pushing the image to the front page. You open the app and... Your expensive phone just died. Were you at fault for that? No. You get to join the arbitration group and get an individual settlement of $12.
Think more evil. Don't stick with the "I have nothing to lose" because you almost always have something to lose. The fact these terms were even thought of and written means you do have a financial investment in the platform.
That's why 2FA via phone number shouldn't be a thing
If the mods or admin do something that causes you injury, such as ignoring requests that will prevent harassment.
......how would them ignoring requests cause injury??? We're still talking about bluedky, right? The online twitter clone without musk as it's main selling point?
If someone was doxxing you on bluesky, for example, and in the doxxing, you got attacked/injured by someone who recognized you/went to your house.
Then the person liable to you would be the person doxxing you, not Bluesky themselves unless Bluesky themselves was the party that doxxed you and in that case I don't think a court would hold you to the arbitration.
We've seen Disney try but then withdraw an attempt to enforce arbitration when a lady died from an allergic reaction in their* restaurant and their partner had signed up for Disney+ free trial. It's not unimaginable a court would hold you to it since we're already in Upsidedown World where forced arbitrary is legal.
That is an ass pull if I've ever heard one.
Let me make sure I understand your comment correctly.
You're saying that if you post information publically, on a platform whose whole concept is that everything is public, and someone uses information you posted there to identify you, stalk you, break and enter, and then assault you.......that it's the fault of the service you used to post that identifying information?
That's the arguement being made?
No, I believe the argument they're making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn't take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could've done something, but didn't.
A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that's another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person's private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they'd be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can't sue them for it.
This is correct.
I find this weird. If someone were to send your private information to someone via physical post, is the post company responsible for that too?
Ah, THAT explaination at least has legs. All these other responses I'm getting are these abstract "mouse trap if everything goes exactly like this", sort of explainations.
Although, I still don't think financial recouperation is the path I'd take. I would be pressing legal charges. Like, criminal acts go to prison type charges.
I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can't be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they're a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.
Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can't take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let's them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.
Would you say it is a one in a 30 million occurrence, roughly?
It was an asspull example but there are similar cases in the past. Forced arbitration of any lawsuit you present for any reason is bad, be it as simple as their software accidentally bricking your phone or as major as an attempt on your life being ignored by the platform.
You have nothing to hide. Just sign away all your rights.
They can break data protection laws and stuff...
Ok......and why would they pay YOU that money? Wouldn't it be companies and governments they pay?
If a company violates my rights and causes issues for me due to leaking data, then obviously i can sue them for damages.
I've gotten settlement money from it before
During signup, they make it sound like it's a federated service. It is not. Dumped it when it was explained to me.
Off topic, but I pointing this out reminded me of visiting some ancap circles to see the crazy stuff they discuss. At one point there was a question about how externalities would be handled in their system of private courts and such. When ever I do read some terms and conditions there is almost always something in regard to arbitration. Predictably they were not happy about someone pointing that out and explaining that it is for the benefit of corporations not the customers.