Ten years ago, Chase was forced to withdraw the binding arbitration clauses in its credit card agreements as part of a settlement in a class-action suit (the company was accused of conspiring with other banks to force all credit-card customers to accept binding arbitration) (one of the things binding arbitration does is deprive you of your right to join class-action suits!). — Read the rest
Binding arbitration is a way for corporations to force you to surrender your legal rights as a condition of doing business, relegating you to seeking redress for breaches and harms by going before a paid arbitrator who is in the employ of the company that harmed you, and who almost always sides with their employer.
A class action suit by some of the 3,500,000+ Wells Fargo customers defrauded in the company's fake account scam was foundering in Utah, thanks to the company's insistence that its binding arbitration clauses also applied to the accounts it fraudulently opened (that is, by agreeing not to sue the company for defrauding you over the accounts you opened, you were also agreeing not to sue them if it opened a bunch more accounts and forged your signature on the papers).
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services barred nursing homes from forcing their residents into accepting binding arbitration agreements that would move all legal claims into business-friendly fake courts where the proceedings are often secret, and where the presiding fake judges draw their pay from the companies that are accused of malfeasance.
Wells Fargo got caught ripping off millions of customers by setting up fake accounts in their names, then billing them for "services" related to those accounts, sometimes tanking their credit-ratings, costing them jobs, even their houses — but the company says you're not allowed to sue them because their employees fraudulently signed your name to a "binding arbitration" agreement that forces you to take your case to a fake judge whose salary they pay.
Like most other online services, Pokemon Go's terms of service are a reboot of the Book of Revelations, full of bizarre horrors, each more grotesque than the last.
Borrowing a trick from the Comcast/AT&T playbook, Google Fiber now forces customers who are unhappy with the service to surrender their right to sue and to join class actions in favor of binding arbitration, a one-sided system of shadow courts that overwhelmingly delivers rulings in favor of the big companies that pay for it.
The March 29 edition of Airbnb's terms of service requires that people who rent out their homes acknowledge that despite the company's widely advertised Host Protection Insurance program, "you understand and agree that Airbnb does not act as an insurer."
Trumpy Trout is a real product. The ads run on "Newsmax." It exists at a place where the partisan payload of it hardly matters any more, a place where meaning loses all grasp on us, where latent patterns of psychic trauma reassemble themselves from the noisy wake of our rotting yet accellerating minds. — Read the rest
A machine learning engineer and consultant named Jason Liu wrote about how Chase bank froze $180,000 of his money with no warning. He couldn't make payroll, and Chase refused to tell him why it froze the funds. After Liu pushed, Chase said it was going to close his account and mail a cashier's check, which turned out to be a lie. — Read the rest
Trump cultist Mike Lindell's rage against the voting machine has caused big box retailers and shopping networks to stop selling his pillows, and now he's having to sell some of the company's equipment, reports The Minneapolis StarTribune. "Sewing machines, industrial fabric spreaders, forklifts and even desks and chairs are up for auction," according to the paper. — Read the rest
A binding arbitration panel has ordered Mike Lindell to pay $5 million to a cybersecurity expert who proved that Lindell's evidence that China interfered in the 2020 Presidential election was bogus. The winner of the prize is Robert Zeidman, a 63-year-old computer forensics expert who says he voted for Trump in the two most recent elections. — Read the rest
I tried to start Adobe Acrobat today, part of the Creative Cloud suite, and it wouldn't start unless I agreed to new Terms of Use. But to read the Terms of Use, I had to agree to the Terms of Use first. — Read the rest
Do Not Pay, the "robot lawyer" that can help you do everything from beat a traffic ticket to getting access to services for poor and homeless people, has rolled out a new service: "Do Not Sign," a tool to analyze terms of service agreements.
Spotted today in my Lyft app: a new set of terms and conditions that require you to "agree" to binding arbitration (an onerous condition heretofore reserved for downtrodden drivers), through which you agree to waive your right to join class action suits or pursue legal redress through the courts should Lyft, through its deliberate actions or negligence, cause you to be killed, maimed, raped or cheated — something that, not coincidentally, Lyft is in a lot of trouble over at the moment.
Google and the other big tech companies are some of the most lavish funders of climate denial "think tanks" and lobbying groups, something they've been at continuously for more than six years, without interruption.
An investigation by Propublica and Bayerischer Rundfunk found 187 servers hosting more than 5,000,000 patients' confidential medical records and scans (including a mix of Social Security numbers, home addresses and phone numbers, scans and images, and medical files) that were accessible by the public, "available to anyone with basic computer expertise."
On May 21, the American Law Institute — a kind of star chamber of 4,000 judges, law professors, and lawyers — was scheduled to pass a "restatement" of the law of consumer contracts, with the plan being to codify case-law to ensure that terms of service would be treated as enforceable obligations by US courts.
The American Law Institute is a group of 4,000 judges, law profs and lawyers that issues incredibly influential "restatements" of precedents and trends in law, which are then heavily relied upon by judges in future rulings; for seven years they have been working on a restatement of the law of consumer contracts (including terms of service) and now they're ready to publish.
The waves of protests and walkouts that swept Google last year had many grievances and concerns, from the company's Pentagon contract to supply AI for drones to the secret creation of a censored search tool for the Chinese market, but one central flashpoint was the revelation that the company had paid Android exec $90 million to quietly leave the company after a string of disturbing sexual harassment and abuse incidents came to light.
