Do You Know What’s Really Inside Your Apple User Agreement?
Confession time: Does anybody actually read those user agreements that come every time you get a new product? We certainly don’t. Our preferred method is a brief browse (at best!) and then an instant click on “I agree.” If you’ve got an Apple product, you’ve clicked away on a user agreement. There’s one for every single Apple thing out there: iCloud, iTunes, iChat, iOS, etc… and these user agreements, although they may not feel like it, are actually binding and legal contracts. But do you know what you’ve actually agreed to?
Quartz dug through 100,000 words of Apple contracts and found that, although most of the contracts say the same basic things (Apple is not held liable if your device fails or explodes; you can’t hack into the phone and change how it works), there are some more surprising things tucked away for different programs.
For example, iTunes can suspend your access to stuff that you’ve already paid for. And you can’t burn CDs from your downloaded music any more than seven times. Apple software is only guaranteed to work on an Apple device. So if you bought something from the iTunes store, Apple will not be held accountable if it does not work on an Android phone. Also: If Apple ever goes out of business, your purchases could just fade away and you’d be left with nothing.
We’re not saying you need to read every single word in a user agreement before accepting it (that would be almost impossible because Apple is constantly updating their terms of service), we’re just letting you know that we’re possibly all in over our heads. The next step could come from our lawmakers, so stay tuned.
Do you read the fine print online? Let us know @BritandCo!
(h/t Quartz)