Loading Profile...
Even friendlier Terms of Service
Flickr and Zooomr, and many others don't have friendly Terms of Service. One of the reasons Google has a lot of goodwill is its policy of "doing good".
The Terms of Service of Expono are quite simple and friendly but they could need some updating and modifying. If you also want to "do good", you need to consider your users "digital rights". At least consider giving your "Pro" users more favourable terms. My quick suggestions:
http://www.expono.com/go/terms
* You write "Expono reserves the right to update and change the Terms of Service from time to time without notice". I understand that this makes things very much easier for you and that everyone does this, but really, when in "real life" do you accept such conditions. Why can't we get 14 days of notice if we so choose?
* "Violation of any of the terms below will result in the termination of your Account". I think this contradicts some of the parts further down where suspension is mentioned. The wording is also too hard, will you terminate my account because I celebrate my 13th birthday tomorrow, because someone hacked my account, or because I block ads? I have been scared by Flickr's many account deletions without notice. The least you could do is to suspend the account and give the user a chance to backup his content. This counts for all kinds of breaches.
* What does this mean: "even when Content is posted by others who have accounts under your account". Can another user have an account "under my account"?
* "If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads." Is this really necessary to include in your ToS? Is it such a huge problem? Will you enforce it?
* Partial refunds make you more friendly, I'd be impressed.
* "Expono, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other Expono service, for any reason at any time" If you all continue acting as dictatorial judges like this, laws will eventually have to written to protect user's "digital rights".
* "If your bandwidth usage exceeds 100 GB/month, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your image hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption." The part about "disable" should not be in there. Why would you do that, just throttle or disable image downloading and uploading. Shouldn't the limit be different for regular and pro users?
All in all, just try to be a little friendlier, not so hard in wording about termination and all. Flickr has really scared me and others with their dictatorial way of just deleting accounts without notice: see http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-u... http://thomashawk.com/2009/01/how-would-you-feel-if-your-flickr-account-were-permanently-deleted.html/comment-page-1#comment-30462
If I was to rely on expono for storing my photos I couldn't risk you just deleting them all because I happened to use a ad block or posted a snide comment about one of your employees in one of the forums.
Oh, and BTW, on the front page the link to the "Terms of Service" is called "Terms of Use", which is it?
The Terms of Service of Expono are quite simple and friendly but they could need some updating and modifying. If you also want to "do good", you need to consider your users "digital rights". At least consider giving your "Pro" users more favourable terms. My quick suggestions:
http://www.expono.com/go/terms
* You write "Expono reserves the right to update and change the Terms of Service from time to time without notice". I understand that this makes things very much easier for you and that everyone does this, but really, when in "real life" do you accept such conditions. Why can't we get 14 days of notice if we so choose?
* "Violation of any of the terms below will result in the termination of your Account". I think this contradicts some of the parts further down where suspension is mentioned. The wording is also too hard, will you terminate my account because I celebrate my 13th birthday tomorrow, because someone hacked my account, or because I block ads? I have been scared by Flickr's many account deletions without notice. The least you could do is to suspend the account and give the user a chance to backup his content. This counts for all kinds of breaches.
* What does this mean: "even when Content is posted by others who have accounts under your account". Can another user have an account "under my account"?
* "If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads." Is this really necessary to include in your ToS? Is it such a huge problem? Will you enforce it?
* Partial refunds make you more friendly, I'd be impressed.
* "Expono, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other Expono service, for any reason at any time" If you all continue acting as dictatorial judges like this, laws will eventually have to written to protect user's "digital rights".
* "If your bandwidth usage exceeds 100 GB/month, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your image hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption." The part about "disable" should not be in there. Why would you do that, just throttle or disable image downloading and uploading. Shouldn't the limit be different for regular and pro users?
All in all, just try to be a little friendlier, not so hard in wording about termination and all. Flickr has really scared me and others with their dictatorial way of just deleting accounts without notice: see http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-u... http://thomashawk.com/2009/01/how-would-you-feel-if-your-flickr-account-were-permanently-deleted.html/comment-page-1#comment-30462
If I was to rely on expono for storing my photos I couldn't risk you just deleting them all because I happened to use a ad block or posted a snide comment about one of your employees in one of the forums.
Oh, and BTW, on the front page the link to the "Terms of Service" is called "Terms of Use", which is it?
I’m hopeful
1
person likes this idea
I like this idea!
Tell me when this idea gets some attention.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The company has this under consideration.
-
Inappropriate?Wow, this was a long post!
We definitely want to be on the "friendly" side of things. One of the reasons we built the site was to give as much power to the users as possible, not only in terms of features, but in terms of "digital rights".
I agree that portions of the ToS may sound hearse, I would probably react the same way as you as an honest user. However, one thing one learns when operating a public site is that the world consists of a lot of dishonest people.
We are huge believers in the Company-Customer Pact http://www.ccpact.com/ (search and you will find us). It means us (Expono) and our users should work together to build long-term relations that lead to trust, strong communities, and sustainable businesses.
How stupid it all may sound, the Terms of Service is not written for you or other honest users. It is written to protect us and our users from the evil users.
I'm a user myself and one of my goals with Expono was to build a site users can trust, and a site where you can feel that the team behind the site are on the users side and will protect the users content.
So to be clear on things:
- We don't delete active accounts.
- We don't delete content.
- We will never censor content based on our own beliefs.
- We don't do any screening of content.
- We don't have access to private data (private photos are not visible for us in the back office).
We may disable accounts or restrict access to content in the following scenarios:
- Incoming complaints of illegal activities that are obvious (don't need to be proven in court). Example: clear cases of child pornography. Children being hurt. This content will have its access removed immediately and the authorities will be contacted.
What about copyright complaints? We don't remove content because of complaints. We don't do any investigation. To have copyrighted material removed we need to be contacted by the right authorities or have a court order. We simply can't determine if a copyright complaint is valid or not. Except in obvious cases. A scenario: A user uploads 1000 DVD covers. Do we remove it? No. Do we remove it if we receive a letter from a lawyer representing one of the companies behind the DVD covers? Yes, because we have a responsibility for our thousands of other users.
But there is always two sides of the story, and the world is not as utopian that one would want. Most people make their assumption from their own experience that users are honest.
Even if Expono is an all new service and only been open to the public for the two months we got our first evil users within the first hours of opening.
I spent a whole day fighting a user that were close to having us shutdown, we even called him and begged him to be reasonable and stop. Let me tell you the story:
What he did was to import 15,000 emails (which was our import limit). He then uploaded photos of real estates that were on sale. He then spammed these 15,000 individuals (who sent SPAM complaints) with different email shares of different real estate albums. He sent 45,000 emails through our system. It was a very clear case of SPAM. I contacted him to let him know that SPAM is strictly forbidden by law. I warned him that if he didn't stop the activities I would have to block his account. Did he stop? No.
So I blocked the account.... and he opened another one.... imported 15,000 emails.. spammed.. I blocked... another one was opened.. rinse and repeat. I contacted him via all the different emails. Expono started to get flooded with spam complaints. Our email provider almost shut us down.
One user almost ruined everything for both us and our users.
We even called him (did some research and found out his phone number in Mexico and USA) and left a message on his answering machine begging him to stop his activities.
In this case I'm glad we had the ToS, we didn't have time to give warnings (for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th accounts he registered).
We had to quickly disable account after account. Without a Terms of Service like we have he could have suit us.
Our service is international and our servers are located in United States. So Norwegian law doesn't apply there. In United States you can be suit for anything. This is one of the reasons most ToS:es sounds like you as a user are giving up all your rights.
Unfortunately, users like this force us to spend time on developing restrictions in the system and to keep legal agreements around that may sound hearse in the ears of our honest users.
With all this said, I appreciate your concerns about this and I would like to modify the ToS so it feels comfortable for our users. Let's keep this topic open and discuss changes to our ToS. We listen to our users, you are the very core of why we build Expono!
Now when I had the opportunity to explain our concerns, I would appreciate if you could pin-point which specific parts of the ToS you really would like to have changed. I'll take the time to comment each of your concerns, and a solution of possible changes.
I hope my reply strengthen your trust in us, the Team behind the site.
Oh, and no, we won't delete your content or disable your account if you use an ad-blocker, but we would appreciate your support if you like and use our service :-)
Have a nice weekend!
Best regards,
Magnus Jonsson
Co-Founder
Expono
I’m confident
-
Inappropriate?Whoha! Long reply!
Sorry I didn't follow up in due time.
This ceertainly strengthened my trust in you, the ccpact is a good first step and I am very glad you could be so clear.
It is of course important that you have tools to fight "the evil guys" and you should not use too much time on it. It will probably be one of your main challenges, as it probably is Flickr's failing to differentiate between good and bad user that has lead me to distrust them. It is also all the restrictions and hostilities stemming from the fight against bad users that Wikipedia is starting to suffer from.
Now that you have been clear on why you need the kind of ToS, I'll see if there are things that you should fix anyhow:
* What does this mean: "even when Content is posted by others who have accounts under your account".
Can another user have an account "under my account"?
* "If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads."
Is this really necessary to include in your ToS? Is it such a huge problem? Will you enforce it?
* "If your bandwidth usage exceeds 100 GB/month, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your image hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption."
Shouldn't this be in your price list or some other place more visible? And why would you disable the account, just throttle or disable image downloading and uploading. Shouldn't the limit be different for regular and pro users?
I’m hoping Expono staff still have time
-
Inappropriate?I'm in the middle of testing our latest update that will go live in a couple of days, but I couldn't resist in writing a reply now :)
>* What does this mean: "even when Content is posted by others who have >accounts under your account".
>Can another user have an account "under my account"?
As default no, but some sport organizations want the ability to add all their club members under a "Club Master Account". This is not a default functionality, and it's something we are considering by request.
>* "If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads."
>Is this really necessary to include in your ToS? Is it such a huge problem? >Will you enforce it?
When you are negotiating with ad firms, they tell you to inform your users they are not allowed to block ads. So this sentence is basically there for them when they review the ToS :) No, we won't enforce this. In fact, our time is better spent on improving Expono and help users. Expono is currently 100% Ad-Free, but Ads would help us to cover operating costs for free users.
>* "If your bandwidth usage exceeds 100 GB/month, we reserve the right to >immediately disable your account or throttle your image hosting until you >can reduce your bandwidth consumption."
>Shouldn't this be in your price list or some other place more visible? And >why would you disable the account, just throttle or disable image >downloading and uploading. Shouldn't the limit be different for regular and >pro users?
This is just a limit to protect our site and users from unusually high traffic. If a some users would affect the performance of the site, we may need to throttle or disable the account until we can catch up the the traffic. However,100GB may be a bit low in that sense, so we might change that in the future, but right now, users are not even near that limit, so one should not be worried about it. This is also not monitored or automatically checked to be enforced, but if we receive traffic spikes and find out that it's coming from one user and it affects the site, we may need to do something until we have resolved the issues. Also, 100GB downloads is between 10-17 USD in bandwidth cost depending how much bandwidth we use in total. As with all limits, having more production data of usage, help us to adjust the limits accordingly.
I hope this answers your remaining questions. Also, we are going to improve the ToS in conjunction with account changes (1-2 months ahead), and I'll take your feedback and others into account. It's definitely good for us to know what people have questions about and dislike so we can improve upon that.
Please, don't hesitate to bump this topic again and ping me. :-)
Thanks for all feedback!
I’m thankful
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
EMPLOYEE
