Wondering “What is the deal with,” or “How much will I get paid from” the Apple iCloud storage breach of contract class action settlement? Here’s everything you need to know, including the full text of the Williams v. Apple complaint which sparked it all. Here’s what happened: in 2019 Andrea Williams sued Apple for breach of contract, saying that, in violation of Apple’s terms of service, Apple was storing iCloud users’ data on 3rd-party servers, rather than on their own servers over which they exercised full control. Now Apple has settled the class action lawsuit, and so if you are a U.S.-based iCloud subscriber who paid for an iCloud subscription at any time between September 16, 2015 and January 31, 2016, you are a member of the class who is to be compensated.

You will either be receiving or have recently received an email from Twitter about the “Updates to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy”. Shadow banning (or ‘shadowbanning’) is included, plus they get to use anything you post however they want.

LiveJournal has come fully under Russian control since January of this year, and as of last week LiveJournal and its users are now completely subject to Russian law. In reality, LiveJournal (also known as LJ), a place to, well, live journal your thoughts, etc., has been owned by Russian interests since 2007, but many users either didn’t know that, or didn’t care because LJ was still being managed out of California, and the LiveJournal servers were located in California. But all that has changed. (Note: We have provided the full text of both the LiveJournal TOS and the controlling Russian law at the end of this article.)

As we wrote about at the beginning of July, Paypal had rolled out a new user agreement, or Terms of Service (TOS) that included your agreeing to their robocalling or autodialing you, not just for account updates and fraud alerts, but for marketing as well. Now they have backed off from that.

Effective today, July 1, 2015, Paypal’s new User Agreement (Terms of Service) goes into effect. It contains lots of small changes, and one big one: You consent to receive autodialed or prerecorded calls and text messages from PayPal at any telephone number that you have provided us or that we have otherwise obtained. Which is why we’re putting together a list of Paypal numbers from which Paypal calls.

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS; DR) is a site that essentially distills the Terms of Service from hundreds of online companies and sites, provides a synopsis of those Terms of Service, and rates those terms of service for you. The ratings range from Class A (meaning very good) to Class E (meaning very bad). Not surprisingly, the larger the company (cough – YouTube, Twitter), the lower the rating, while smaller, more privacy conscientious organizations (such as DuckDuckGo, the “search engine that doesn’t track you”) tend to rate more highly.

Do you take the time to fully read every Terms of Service (TOS) before you click your consent to them? If you said “No”, well, you’re not alone. In fact, if you said “Yes”, then studies suggest you are probably lying, as studies show that nobody reads those Terms of Service.

Paypal’s Terms of Service (TOS) regarding disputes for “significantly not as described” (SNAD) section lead to a heartbreaking situation in which an eBay buyer who requested a refund when he decided that an antique violin for which he’d paid $2500 was a fake, was ordered by Paypal to first destroy the violin (why the buyer didn’t just arrange with the seller to return it for a refund is beyond us). This is a fine example of why it’s such a bad idea to do business with a company that controls both halves of the transaction (Paypal and eBay are now two sides of the same company.)

As we recently wrote, Twitter has just posted a new Terms of Service. And, intentionally or otherwise, Twitter has banned anyone under 18 years old from using Twitter.

Twitter has updated and posted new Terms of Service (ToS), which are effective immediately. The new Terms of Service more directly address the issues of spam, and make clear that what happens on Twitter can be used by Twitter, but still belongs to the user.

AT&T has amended the language of its Terms of Service (TOS) to prohibit AT&T’s customers from participating in any class action lawsuits or class arbitrations against AT&T.

If you were among those who were upset by the criminal conviction of Lori Drew – the mother behind the MySpace incident that lead to the suicide of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier – you are either about to be relieved, or outraged, depending on where you stood on the case. Lori Drew, who had been facing felony charges due to her involvement in the case, received, instead, three misdemeanor convictions. Now a Federal court is overturning those convictions.

If you are used to getting payments sent to your Paypal account, you may have noticed in the past couple of weeks that you are suddenly being charged a fee even for Paypal to Paypal payments! In other words, where it used to be free to send and receive payments between Paypal accounts, suddenly (and seemingly without warning), Paypal users are getting hit with fees for inter-Paypal transfers! It has to do with their new, amended Paypal terms of service, which we include below.

Less than a week after Facebook announced its new Terms of Service (TOS), Facebook has announced that they are going back to the TOS drawing board, and have reinstated their old Terms of Service in the meantime. They are also requesting user input via the Facebook group called “The Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”.

Facebook has responded to the concern engendered by the new Facebook TOS with a post by none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself. In his comments, Zuckerberg tries to allay the fears of Facebook users by saying that even though the new Facebook TOS says that Facebook can use all user-generated content however they want, and forever, they wouldn’t really do so. Unfortunately, that doesn’t cut it.