Signing contracts without reading them can be a dangerous business (how do you think I ended up paying for William Shatner’s hairpiece?) and the iPhone contract is a particularly bulky one. Apple have rolled the AT&T agreement, iTunes and iPhone software, Google Maps and YouTube usage together with user consent that an email from the company “will satisfy any legal communication requirements” into one great big document, and Wired took it to the Electronic Frontier Foundation where staff attorney Fred von Lohmann was pretty critical:
“I think there’s no chance whatsoever that a layperson would understand it and I doubt they could get through it. I think most lawyers wouldn’t understand it either”
Stumbling blocks include the charges enforced when roaming – which although legal are pretty unclear – and limitations on reverse-engineering the handset to find potential software exploits. Unlocking the iPhone, under the terms of the AT&T contract, is also prohibited, despite the governmental ruling last year that it was legal.
More worryingly, AT&T also forbids class-action lawsuits and Apple demand freedom to monitor your iPhone “to verify compliance with the terms of this licence”; that could mean anything from checking to see if you’ve altered the firmware, are running a non-AT&T SIM or even include (admittedly at a stretch) looking at text messages and voicemail. While Apple would no doubt deny that they would go so far (and they point out that technical information collected would be used in non-personally-identifiable ways), the EFF’s view is that the contract is not clear enough of the rights and limitations users can expect.
I haven’t bought mine yet (waiting for the 3G version). I would join a class action suit if legal standing could be established.
Whoa! I had no idea iPhone’s contract had such a big brother feel to it. I mean, you always expect companies to cover their ass in the blanket-all contract, but you spelling it out like that proves how big that blanket is!
AT&T and Apple invading your privacy should have nothing to do with a blanket-all contract. The fact that they even add into their contract that unlocking the iPhone isn’t allowed even though it’s legally acceptable to do so just goes to show how, in a way, they are undermining the US Government. Funny enough, this makes Apple look like that corporation in that movie with Ryan Phillippe where he worked for a company that was in fact supposed to imitate Microsoft… and they were trying to take over the world type thing. hah