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Comment by pzo | Hacker News Reader

I have been literally spammed in the last month on my iPhone (even though still using iOS 14) with apple notifications asking me "Do you agree to new terms of agreements? <Yes> <We will ask you later>" (that's regarding new iCloud terms). I was always careful not to miss click and not to agree. No matter what few days later I kept giving the same notification. The stopped for some reason after few months and now I don't know if:

1) I agree by accident

2) They thankfully stopped nagging me

3) Or they buggy implemented it and even though I kept cancelling after few tries they assumed I agreed.

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I'm still tapping "later" on WhatsApp's ToS changes. I wonder how much longer I can get away with it.

Likewise. I've managed to keep that little shit show in limbo for several months now. Wonder the same thing.

A few weeks ago I was forced to accept or I couldn't keep using the app at all.

What have you switched to now?

I haven't switched, I accepted them because I don't really care. I just wanted to see for how long I could push it.

At the moment Facebook bought them I started researching alternatives and I am happy to say that a couple of hundred friends and family of mine have switched and not a single person has tried to reach me on WhatsApp for months until I uninstalled it.

I don’t think cloud services realistically can do something else than forcing all users to accept the latest license.

If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare.

You could get questions such as “Can you make a backup in country C for user U? He’s under the 2019 terms, so in principle, yes, but alas, user V has shared content with U, and V still is under the 2017 terms. Also, U has been in the EU for the past weeks, so EU regulations apply, at least as far as we catered for them in the 2019 terms”

Not changing the terms isn’t an option, either, as they have to be changed to cater for changes in laws. If you operate in 100+ countries,

> If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare.

That's their problem to figure out. If they can't then they should terminate customers who don't agree and ship them their data.

Obviously they'll never do that since it would be a terrible look and they'd lose customers, because they want to have their cake and eat it, too.

I am not sympathetic to how hard it would be for a corporation to do something. "It's too hard" is not an excuse, not least of all if they're a multi-billion dollar corporation.

We don’t use that kind of reasoning with other service providers.

If, for example, your bank changes their terms, your electricity provider increases prices, landlords increase rent, etc. they will inform you and often silently enrol you in the new scheme. Cancelling the agreement always (and maybe not even that) is an option, but that is opt-out, not opt-in.

So, why would cloud providers be different?

My bank grandfathered me onto an account TOS for a decade before giving me a "move to our modern accounts or close" ultimatum, my electricity provider has legal limits to what the the unit rate and landlords are limited to one rate increase every 12 months, which in my city also has its amount limited. If my phone, internet or TV company wants to increase prices that voids any contractual lock in period I may have been held to otherwise. I work for a B2B company and we do gate features depending on which revision of the TOS the client has agreed to.

In short, other countries outside the US _do_ hold other service providers to similar standards.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. If we don’t hold other service providers to the same standard then that’s our failing.

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