Edit: added Axios link, removed double quote for Axios paragraphs
Forbidding people from filing class action lawsuit, as Axios notes, hides information about the proceedings from the public since affected parties typically attempt to resolve disputes with arbitrators in private. Experts, such as Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Nancy Kim, an online contractor expert, told Axios that changing its terms wouldn’t be enough to protect 23andMe in court.
The company did not publicly reveal the full extent of the breach until around two months after it occurred.
The latest: At least two law firms are pursuing a class action against 23andMe.
Canada-based law firms YLaw and KND Complex Litigation have proposed a class-action lawsuit against the company in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
Of note: In emails notifying customers of the terms of service change, the company has said people are able to opt out if they email “[email protected]” within 30 days of receiving the notice.
However, the updated terms of service requires customers to email a different address, “[email protected].”
The latter would be an arbitration agreement, and unfortunately I think they're enforceable. They make you sign an contract waiving your rights and agreeing to arbitration.
On May 21, 2018, the United States Supreme Court, in a long-awaited decision, held that employment arbitration agreements with class action waivers requiring individual arbitration are enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act (the “FAA”), notwithstanding Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (the “NLRA”), which protects employees’ rights to engage in concerted activities.
But they might not be. Sure, if I had some case related to this I would get legal advice.
Arbitration agreements are supposed to ensure that disputes are resolved outside of court, and that’s why it’s an irony of almost cosmic proportions that “the enforceability of arbitration agreements is likely ‘the single most litigated contractual issue’ today
The answer, fortunately, is yes, but it is important to keep in mind the most basic characteristic of arbitration agreements - they are contracts. Both Federal and State laws foster a strong policy favoring arbitration, but each provides that the enforceability of agreements requiring arbitration for work-related disputes will be determined by applicable state law regarding contract principles.
The majority of published case law suggests that arbitration agreements are most commonly challenged on the basis that they lack mutuality of contract, lack adequate consideration for the contract, or are unconscionable. These tripping blocks can be avoided by drafting a carefully-worded arbitration agreement and providing employees ample notice and opportunity to review the agreement.
The latter is why 23andMe is giving people the chance to review the new TOS first. It also is probably different for a TOS vs an employment contract.
I just learned this the hard way. I just got laid off and rejected the severance check because in order to get it, we had to sign a thing that said we waived our right to ever sue them for anything
in order for a ToS to be legally enforcable, the user has to see it. A user cannot give consent on an agreement they did not see, therefor in court it would be 23andMes job to verify that the user was indeed aware of the ToS and acted accordingly. they could not say everyone ops in and defend themselves that way by default because not everyone that was forcibly opted in gave an agreement to the new ToS.
Exactly. There’s a world of difference between “You must agree to the terms to continue use of the service”, displaying the new terms before a user can continue, and just saying “If you don’t reply within 30 days we’re changing the terms of the contract without your input”.
Desperate strategy they’re hoping will fool some of the people some of the time.
Trusting complete strangers with highly personal information is never a good idea. Even if they promise to take good care of it, before or after they’ve already got your money.
IANAL, but I think they should be in a far weaker position with their whole “if you don’t object within 30 days we will consider you to have accepted”. They can’t really argue that no positive action from the other party is construed as acceptance of a new contract. If there was continued use of the service that would be different, but no action cannot reasonably be construed as acceptance.
I think you’re going to be very surprised by how quickly they win any trial when they first impress upon the court, “I know you are, but what am I?” Of course, the judge will primarily be swayed by the moment when they call a customer to the witness stand and then mutter, “guiltypersonsayswhat”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that no judge would rule in favor of a company who, post-damages, tries to build a loophole that ties the hands of users who likely will no longer trust the platform enough to log on. But this is the legal version of a bully giving a triple-w (wet willy and a wedgie) to someone who’s ignoring them and judges think that kind of behavior is super cool. That’s why if you ever ask a judge “what’s that on your robe?” as then flick their nose when they look down, they’ll simply laugh and you’ll be friends forever.
IANAL, but everything I said feels really accurate. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
That’s exactly how it works, as long as they notify everybody and set a drop dead date on it, usage beyond that point constitutes acceptance. No different than every other passive TOS on the planet.
That’s exactly what they’re trying to do, the point I’m making is it won’t hold up to any scrutiny. You need at least some sort of positive action from the other party to construe agreeing to new terms. Contracts are always two way agreements, in spite of how many consumer facing businesses would like you to believe they dictate the terms.
Not sure about other states, but in my state you can agree to mandatory arbitration for past incidents as long as they don’t do reeeeeally egregious behavior like, eg, slipping a notice into your normal bills and having you “agree” by not objecting within X days.
Except that's not true. Somehow, 23andme missed the almost certainly anomalous activity on thier network that lead to the extraction of 6.9 million users' data. Missing the activity associated with the massive data dump, designing thier system to allow for that? 100% thier fault.
One should not be able to use a set of hacked accounts to dump that much data. That's a design flaw.
As someone in that data breach (not from reused passwords) and of Jewish descent (the seeming target of the hack), I’m going to say it is not blown out of proportion. They previously had no limits on failed login attempts which is pathetic from a security standpoint. They still don’t require 2FA. They say they courage it but it’s not like they bug you about it.
So they failed at multiple points prior to the hack and still fail after. They do have a limit on failed logins now so they have done part off the base level of security.
That’s not quite correct. It says it wasn’t real time because the guy was typing his questions, not speaking them.
However the responses from the AI were all correct. Maybe just not as fast. Maybe it took a few seconds to respond, but that is acceptable at this stage.
They wanted to show you how amazing it really is, and could be if it were hooked up to speech recognition and was able to resolve quicker. Which one day will be the case.
I feel like ToS changes should require the user to accept before being enforceable with no right to suspend the user’s account if they don’t and when it comes to data it should only apply to data the user shared after the changes…
PSA: you can request deletion of your 23andMe account. It won’t do anything for this past hack, but it’ll at least prevent your data from being included in future hacks (assuming they actually completely delete your data like they’re supposed to).
it’s almost always a soft delete, that is, change active field in database to false, coupled with their terms of service that state vaguely how they start the deletion process which could take months and how they may still keep certain data for legitimate purposes.
And this is why I wish we adopted GDPR more… if they are compliant, then they have to remove all data held when requested. Too bad the US will never care that much to respect individuals’ data like that.
How does the legal authority work with GDPR if the company’s physical and financial operations are entirely within the US? Would the GDPR even be allowed to audit them without their consent?
No idea if they’ve been audited. GDPR doesn’t require it. My understanding is that American companies doing any business or having any users in the EU need to be GDPR compliant for those users. I don’t think that’s been challenged in any courts yet.
Why would you this wasn’t even a hack for my understanding?
It was a password stuffing attack. Meaning that a bunch of users with reused crappy passwords had their accounts accessed with their legitimate passwords by attackers.
I’m not sure why this reflects horribly on the company in a way that would encourage one to delete their account?
This would be like leaving the key to your apartment in a public place and then complaining about your landlords terrible security when someone accesses your house when you’re not there.
They stuffed passwords to get them access to information not just on the compromised accounts’ profiles but to detailed data on a large group of other people whose accounts weren’t compromised through a function within 23andMe’s database browser.
I admire their dedication, but at the same time strongly disagree with asking people to pay money for a service, that’s fundamentally based on a hole in a reverse engineered protocol. They won’t win this
I wouldn’t mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I’ve been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It’s worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don’t know if it’s worth it for me. They said they’ll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.
I believe it’s a system that uses an actual Mac as a server for relay. Not really a way for them to stop that, and I doubt they care that much since it requires someone to have a Mac.
They're doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.
Same thing that's been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
Same thing that’s been in the news about some sharing info with police. The comment of the messages are ete encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
Beeper Mini’s GCM server only handles a “new message waiting” trigger, it doesn’t contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.
If you’d rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.
The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can’t just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.
The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.
I’m just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users’ data.
Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.
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