> By transmitting any Communication to the Site, you grant CR an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, unrestricted, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, reproduce, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, edit, create derivative works from, incorporate into one or more compilations and reproduce and distribute such compilations, and otherwise exploit such Communications, together with any personal information transmitted with your Communications (such as name, user name and photograph), in all formats and in all media now known or later developed.
> You acknowledge and agree that any Communications made to or by means of any Site Tool are public and you have no expectation of privacy in any such Communication. No confidential, fiduciary, contractually implied or other relationship is created between you and CR by reason of your transmitting a Communication to any Site Tool.
There has to be a narrower way to draw up this agreement.
They have bad lawyers and bad Chief Legal Officer for allowing this boilerplate in an agreement for an app like this, but these two clauses are less nefarious than they sound.
Technically your writings are copyright by you, so this pairing lets them do whatever with your comments, and display them to others without you coming after them for something.
Since around 2008 I notice everyone is an officer. There was a specific meaning of officer, and now it is big-shot-ism.
Can someone please explain to me why I'm wrong?
But it would have been nice to see that same information on the landing page for the software. Or at least have that link included in the original post here on HN.
Do you feel that what you’ve said has been in service of soliciting that response?
I looked at the website for this app and got an idea of what it’s meant to do. I don’t think I’m particularly smart and found this to be along the lines of any other SaaS app marketing site.
If your gripe is that “anyone can claim that they’re powered by consumer reports”, are you also the sort of person to verify the claim yourself instead of outsourcing that to Hacker News? As made evident by another replier, more information was easily findable.
I still find it ironic that I learn about this thing here as opposed to official CR channels to their membership, but whatever.
Now, as it turns out, the product may well actually be associated with CR, but it's still a fail. At least for now, because they give me nothing beyond a blank page when I select the option to have them tell Home Depot not to sell my data.
I probably won't delete it yet, because I want to see where this product goes. And I want to see what it can do for me that DeleteMe (and other similar tools) cannot. But as of today, it's like the announcement of Twitter, and then getting nothing but a fail whale when I go there.
Will they listen or just laugh it off? Besides, making it the individual's job to run around and tell everyone to delete their data is the worst possible way. And who has data on you without your knowledge? How about not collecting all that data in the first place?
Edit for clarification: I'm not criticizing CR, they're doing what they can under the circumstances.
“Permission Slip helps you exercise your right to privacy under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) by acting as your ‘authorized agent’ and sending data requests to companies for you.”
https://www.permissionslipcr.com/faq.php
The California Attorney General is monitoring companies’ compliance with authorized agent requests:
“The sweep also focuses on businesses that failed to process consumer requests submitted via an authorized agent, as required by the CCPA. Requests submitted by authorized agents include those sent by Permission Slip, a mobile application developed by Consumer Reports that allows consumers to send requests to opt-out and delete their personal information.”
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ahead-data-privacy-da...
Bank ask about job and income information (for bigger stuff like mortgage) when you get the mortgage, not keep a file with your entire life's of financial information.
I'm not saying the trade-off is worth it for everyone, I'm just saying there's a trade-off, unlike in advertising.
Funny, I suggested building an app exactly like this a month ago. In unusual HN fashion, I was immediately shot down as “that would never work” [1]. I feel vindicated that Consumer Reports built this :p.
Their website connected very intimately with the sales channels and they made their money from referrals.
This reminds me of apple touting privacy, while simultaneously tracking all your activity with little or no recourse.
Do you mean hyperlinks?
They're not hiding anything: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/our-partners/co...
They accepted no advertising in their magazine. They bought cars independently, and tested them as customers.
I think their "adaptation" to the internet might have been necessary to survive, but I believe it made them less objective.
For example, I trust my parents to do what they think is best for me, because I have decades of experience showing that is genuinely their goal. But would I trust my father to perform open-heart surgery on me? Absolutely not! The man doesn't have a medical degree of any kind.
With corporations, my trust is largely based on their incentives.
I trust Comcast not to sell my credit card data to Nigerian scammers, because they're clearly making more money by being a cable provider than they would by being a credit card data darknet wholesaler, and selling my credit card data to Nigerian scammers would put their more profitable business at risk.
VPNs... might sell my credit card data to Nigerian scammers, because their profit margins aren't as high and their reputations are already not great.
I don't trust Comcast not to report my metadata to the NSA or to reject MPAA requests for torrent data, because they already did both those things and have incentives to continue.
I trust VPNs to request MPAA requests for torrent data, because as soon as that became known it would hurt their business model. I don't trust VPNs not to report my metadata to the NSA because acting as a honey trap for the NSA could be pretty profitable and probably wouldn't become public, so it wouldn't hurt their business model.
