The Small Print Project                                       

A collaborative document of experiences with agreements in the digital age as they are designed and encountered.

October 24, 2006

SSN & Resume Required if You Link to Us

Posted to EULA of the Week, TOS by Andy Sternberg

So says the Terms of Service on the Boston School of Electrolysis (for Permanent Hair Removal) Web site.

The basic demands of this TOS:

In your request you must submit a legal photo-identification (Drivers license or passport), a valid social security number, a resume with three personal and business references with your legal address of your business and your landline telephone number that you can be reached at without undue delay.

If you do not following these guidelines — “You will be named as a Cyber Pirate aka a person of ill repute.” [emph. added]

I look forward to hearing from them.

(Thanks to Kitty for the suggestion)

Readers: please comment and feel free to contribute your own tale of EULA/waiver/consent astonishment via email or this form.

(and no, I didn’t even think about getting clearance before posting the above).

Comments

  1. spanky
    October 25th, 2006 | 3:56 pm

    Here’s some interesting background:

    http://www.hairfacts.com/brands/websites/boston-school-electrolysis.html

  2. links for 2006-10-26 at [MacStansbury]
    October 26th, 2006 | 7:41 am

    [...] SSN & Resume Required if You Link to Us “You will be named as a Cyber Pirate aka a person of ill repute.” (tags: eula funny legal) [...]

  3. I Like Parentheses (so get used to ‘em) » Who Owns Links?
    October 28th, 2006 | 10:28 pm

    [...] Every once in a while on the web, some company decides to declare ridiculous terms for linking to them such as the Boston School of Electrolysis. [...]

  4. Monster Angriff
    October 30th, 2006 | 7:50 am

    Now that is just plain stupid.

  5. Ms. Liberty
    February 26th, 2007 | 9:52 pm

    Ms. Liberty

    Just when you think Wikiland couldn’t possibly get any weirder, you see things like this. I laughed for nearly three minutes straight! “Our Beloved Jackbooted Kammandantessa at Hairfacts.com is real”? You couldn’t possibly make this stuff up! Here’s some really interesting links and background: about Andrea James at Hairfacts.com

    http://wikipediareview.com/lofiversion/index.php?t5302.html

    http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=5302

    http://www.bostonschoolofelectrolysis.com/…ual-update4.php

  6. lupebaq
    March 27th, 2007 | 8:45 am

    I decided to rattle Kimberly’s cage a bit try to see what is motivating her insane TOU document. I sent the following email to the address I obtained from her domain’s WHOIS record.

    I am writing regarding:

    http://www.bostonschoolofelectrolysis.com/terms.php

    and to inform you that I have published several links to pages within
    the http://www.bostonschoolofelectrolysis.com namespace, and
    furthermore that I will not be sending a photo, resume, or other
    personal information. I do not even have a SSN. You may inspect any
    pages you can find, but I will not provide them to you and your
    approval or rejection will be ignored.

    I invite (and encourage!) you to attempt to charge fines. You will,
    of course, need a lawyer. If you already have a lawyer, you will need
    a new lawyer, judging by your utterly ridiculous terms of use.
    However, if you make good on your promise to defame me on your
    website, I may seek damages. I have done nothing outside my rights.
    In my country, rights cannot be waived. Therefore even if I agreed to
    your terms (which I do not), I would still be within my rights to make
    lawful use of URLs pointing to your website despite your terms, and there
    would be no legal recourse to prevent me.

    I feel I should warn you that you have no expectation of
    confidentiality if you choose to reply. There is a good chance your
    response will be republished in a public medium.

    Having done a bit more research, I’m starting to see that her insane behaviour is probably caused by actual insanity, so probably it wasn’t a good idea to provoke her. But still fun, in a petty sort of way.

  7. Henri
    June 12th, 2007 | 7:05 pm

    Very interesting website. Keep up the outstanding work and thank you…2

  8. los-angeles-laser-hair-removal.1hairremoval
    August 21st, 2007 | 4:32 pm

    [...] look over this staggering snippet at http://smallprint.netzoo.net/ssn-resume-required-if-you-link-to-us/ about [...]

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