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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

Oh, that sounds dystopian - "Ma'am, I'm sorry to inform you that your husband was fatally hit by a car as he attempted to cross the street without his government-mandated V2X tracker; as you are aware, by doing so he triggered the suicide exclusion clause in his insurance policy and forfeited his eligibility"

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All just because he once signed up for a Disney+ trial.

I really like how in German law anything that could be regarded as surprising in a ToS is just thrown out.

I'm pretty sure you can also find that in some EU regulation.

Yes, Germany introduced them in 1976 and the EU based their regulation (Directive 93/13) on it in 1993.

Not a universal principle in Germany though. Today I was awoken by government thugs breaking into my room and telling me that even though I paid my rent, someone else didn't pay theirs so I'm homeless now (collective punishment). If only I was joking.

I refused to leave, so they called more government thugs (i.e. the police) to help them drag me out, but the police told them they have to give people three weeks notice before making them homeless so fuck off.

I'm sorry to hear that. Was this part of your rental agreement? If so WTF? If not what was the reasoning?

Nominally that is the case in US law too. Contracts can not have "unconscionable" clauses in them, and certainly a free trial for a streaming service that you never even paid for several years ago affecting an interaction with an amusement park is insane. But common law (a term of art, not just an adjective stuck to a noun) has a lot of inconvenient principles in it that limit the power of the government, and as the rule of man progresses in the US, this becomes increasingly hypothetical.

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