<story><title>It&apos;s Your Data, It&apos;s Your Bot: It&apos;s Not A Crime</title><url>http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/its-your-data-its-your-bot-its-not-crime</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jimbokun</author><text>It is past time to start awarding prodigious damages against corporations who egregiously and willfully write unlawful provisions into their terms of use, consumer contracts, etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;Parsing and correctly interpreting pages upon pages of legalese presents an undue burden on a well functioning market economy.  Corporations can slip clauses into agreements that can give them vast power over their customers who do not understand the full ramifications of what they are agreeing to.  There is very little cost involved to the corporation that tries to get away with this.  There is a very great cost to our society in tying up our court systems with stupid crap such as this.&lt;p&gt;The only solution is to make the cost of writing illegal provisions into contracts greater to the perpetrator than the potential reward.  I know there will be unintended consequences to what I propose.  But surely there must be a way to send a stronger signal to corporations who willfully push legal boundaries and seek to obfuscate exactly what it is that consumers are agreeing to?</text></comment>
<story><title>It&apos;s Your Data, It&apos;s Your Bot: It&apos;s Not A Crime</title><url>http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/its-your-data-its-your-bot-its-not-crime</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>riffer</author><text>I can&apos;t believe that Facebook is attempting to go after people through criminal law, rather than civil law.&lt;p&gt;Wasn&apos;t the CTO of Facebook just saying less than a week ago that : &quot;users have complete control over their data, and as long as [the] user gives an application explicit consent, Facebook doesn&apos;t get in the way of the user using their data in your applications beyond basic protections like selling data to ad networks and other sleazy data collectors?&quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;I sure hope I&apos;m missing something here.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>