The Small Print Project                            

A collaborative document of experiences with agreements in the digital age.

October 30, 2006

Beware Opobox, Passive Conduit For Your Soul

Posted to EULAs by Andy Sternberg




Anything associated with Classmates.com has GOT to be evil…

Thanks, Robert in NZ for this:

URL of EULA: https://namesdatabase.com/terms.html
Product: Online contacts service to keep track of friends, linked with Classmates.com

Lowpoints: Section 3 “your information”:

Quote: “Your Information” is defined as any information you post or otherwise provide to Opobox and the Opobox Parties through or otherwise related to the Opobox Web Sites. Your Information includes, but is not limited to, information that may be sent to Opobox or the Opobox Parties passively by any electronic agent operating on your behalf including, but not limited to, information such as IP addresses, timestamps, and browser and operating system types and versions. You are solely responsible for Your Information, and Opobox acts as a passive conduit for your online distribution and publication of Your Information.

You grant Opobox a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free right to (a) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat Your Information in any media now
known or not currently known, and (b) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Opobox will not pay you for Your Information. Opobox reserves the right (but not the obligation) to remove or edit Your Information, but does not regularly review Your Information.

BTW: they claim to have a databse of close to 31 million people. Yikes.

Readers: I want more, the good the bad and the ugly. email: asternbe [at] usc [dot] edu | form

* Comments(3)

  • trevsy

    my sister “a christian” who I gave my email address to, used my email to sign me up to “namesdatabase.com” which is part of opobox. wtf am I to do now?????

  • Utepid

    They also state that you can remove your information completely at anytime by using the removal process (which doesn’t work) then they say if that doesn’t work contact member support (again doesn’t work) I’ve tried contacting them multiple times, they reckon if you don’t receive support emails that it means your isp is blocking them but I still get namesdatabse.com emails in my email inbox so this is total crap! They frequently violate their own terms and conditions and are completely non-contactable! The company is putting themselves in open position for action!

  • Utepid

    They also state that you can remove your information completely at anytime by using the removal process (which doesn’t work) then they say if that doesn’t work contact member support (again doesn’t work) I’ve tried contacting them multiple times, they reckon if you don’t receive support emails that it means your isp is blocking them but I still get namesdatabse.com emails in my email inbox so this is total crap! They frequently violate their own terms and conditions and are completely non-contactable! The company is putting themselves in open position for action!