Hacker News Reader

Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

The terms of service prohibits deep linking. Here's me breaking it: https://store.app/terms

Seriously though, WTF? So much for "the web always wins".

Seems very unenforceable. The fact that it is included speaks volumes about the creator of the site though. Wouldn't want to use such a service.

These kinds of terms are not legally enforceable in most juridictions anyway but yes, doesn't paint the authors in a good way.

I find it discouraging that the poster is very active in comments to this post, but thus far is ignoring concerns like this.

Looking at the timestamps from the activity, they probably haven't seen this concern yet. I'm guessing they are West Coast USA and are still asleep for the night. Let's give them some time.

That's a good point, and fair. Sorry to jump the gun.

Indeed, I was asleep. We have a lawyer who handled the terms, presumably adding a bit of boiler plate text that we should have removed. This should definitely not be the case, thank you all for flagging. Will update today.

How many megabytes of text is it reasonable to expect a user to read? This could have been interesting, rendered meaningless by overflow of legalese.

Looks like generic boilerplate ToS to me. It's still bad, but I think this is unintentional.

He's not talking about the contents of the ToS. Click the back button on the page, it takes you back here. You'd expect it to take you back to the homepage of the site. If you deeplink to that page then there's no way out other than editing the URL.

I'm pretty sure he does. “The terms of service prohibits deep linking” is a pretty unambiguous phrase, and it is prohibited indeed:

> Additionally, you agree not to, and will not assist, encourage, or enable others to: [...] Deep-link to any portion of the Services any purpose without our express written permission

The fact that the back link is broken on that very page adds yet another level of irony here though.

> The fact that the back link is broken on that very page adds yet another level of irony here though.

The original Privacy and Terms links do open in a new tab so the back button is broken on the website but works when deep linked.

No, they're just using history.back() on that button, not making a statement.

That's just being lazy on a /tos or /privacy page as most of us have done in our life.

Fix is on staging. Also updated terms to remove the bullet about deep linking, which should not have been included.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com