22.000 people in the UK have agreed to provide hugs to every stray cat and dog they see on the streets because they agreed to the Terms & Conditions of a big UK-based WiFi hotspot provider.
The good news is that those people aren’t actually forced to do this. WiFi hotspot provider Purple put some very unusual and funny clauses in it’s Terms & Conditions as a prank and social experiment. Purple wanted to prove that users rarely read the Terms & Conditions to almost anything, while they should. Experiment succeeded I’d say!
These were the clauses included to the Terms & Conditions:
The user may be be required, at Purple’s discretion, to carry out 1,000 hours of community service. This may include the following. Cleansing local parks of animal waste. Providing hugs to stray cats and dogs. Manually relieving sewer blockages. Cleaning portable lavatories at local festivals and events. Painting snail shells to brighten up their existence. Scraping chewing gum off the streets.
For two weeks straight the clauses remained unnoticed. Purple had set up a prize for the person who did, and guess what, one one person out of 22.000 noticed! Luckily Purple is not going to enforce any of the clauses as this was a media stunt for the company to announce it’s GDPR-compliance.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a new European law that will protect the user’s privacy and consumer rights. With the GDPR companies on European ground will require “ambiguous consent” from users to use their data for marketing purposes.
The law also dictates that users must have full control over their data, allowing them to review or delete it at any time.
“Wi-Fi users need to read terms when they sign up to access a network. What are they agreeing to, how much data are they sharing, and what license are they giving to providers? Our experiment shows it’s all too easy to tick a box and consent to something unfair,” – Gavin Wheeldon, CEO of Purple
Do you think you’d have to clean dirty festival toilets?
