Saturday, September 29, 2007

Ma Bell -becoming more like big brother everyday.


AT&T, the company that is being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over its spying on its customers at the behest of Bushco, has a clause in its terms of service that says it will terminate your service if you criticize them.

I wrote this only after making sure we don't have any AT&T accounts. Hey, iPhone owners - talk nice about yer Ma!

Here's the clause:
5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Termination or suspension by AT&T of Service also constitutes termination or suspension (as applicable) of your license to use any Software. AT&T may also terminate or suspend your Service if you provide false or inaccurate information that is required for the provision of Service or is necessary to allow AT&T to bill you for Service


So, AT&T can spy on you, but you cannot complain about it! Eat it, little people. The corporate boot is on your neck.

6 comments:

Distributorcap said...

amazing, great catch

remember Cingular is now AT&T

i think i am going back to 2 tins and a string

seriously -- time to send this to the ACLU, not that that would do anything other than bring attention to it

Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein said...

When hasn't the corporate boot been on our necks?

Jess Wundrun said...

You better watch it Dr. MvM - charter might adopt the same rules and they'll throw you in the gulag for using the word 'craptacular'!

Anonymous said...

All this time I thought the crick in my neck was from sleeping in a weird position.

Who knew?

God bless the Corporation!

dguzman said...

I was pissed when AT&T bought Cingular--I'm dumping them when my current contract is up. Of course, Verizon's not much better. We're all pretty much stick with that boot on our necks, and my throat is killing me.

Jess Wundrun said...

dguzman, you don't have to dump them - you can have them dump you.

You'll have to do some pissing and moaning on your blog, of course, which might make your regular birders wonder whassup, but it would be an interesting experiment.

Hell, it sounds so good, maybe I'll get an AT&T account just to piss them off and have them dump me!