Terms Of Use
Mac Stevens
via web
To whom it may concern:
I attempted to make a donation using pledgie.com. To make the donation, the only option available was paypal.com. After filling out my credit card and other personal information, the transaction would not be completed until I clicked on the butten labelled, "Agree and Continue", which indicated my agreement with PayPal's user agreement and privacy policy. These two policies by themselves make up 25 pages of text, when pasted into a simple text editor. But they also include by reference a number of other policies, which in turn reference still more, the trail of which I have not bothered to find the end of.
In the past, in similar situations, I have simply clicked
whatever button needed clicking to accomplish the task at hand.
This time, I am refusing. It is not the user agreement itself which
I am refusing. Often when I read such agreements, I find them to be
acceptable. I am refusing simply because I cannot justify the time
to read the verbiage generated by the company's lawyers, and I feel
it is dishonest to say that I agree to something, which in fact, I
can only speculate as to the contents.
Furthermore, I feel it is wrong to discriminate against me, for my honesty, by refusing me service, while providing service to those who are wiling to click the "Agree and Continue" button whether or not they have agreed. I feel it is wrong to present an agreement for acceptance, which the average person cannot possibly read and comprehend within a reasonable period of time, with no opportunity for negotiation and no alternatives.
Please consider altering your software and your user agreements so that the overwhelming majority of your customers do not feel railroaded into making a false representation of their agreement.
Sincerely,
Mac Stevens
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Support Staff 2 Posted by heavysixer on 08 Feb, 2010 12:41 AM
Hi Marc,
Thanks for your feedback. Pledgie is a free service, as such we need to find a way to limit our liability. This means that we use Paypal to handle the credit card transactions. I know that this means Paypal comes with strings attached, but we have no viable alternative at this point. My suggestion would be to contact the campaign owner and see if there is way for you to make a donation "offline" and send them a check or something.
Best,
Mark
heavysixer closed this discussion on 15 Feb, 2010 01:22 AM.