Consumers Should Read Before Clicking 'I Accept'

"This is an area of great importance, but something that many people do not pay enough attention to."

Click-through agreements may be hazardous to your rights of privacy Latest News about privacy and free speech.

Those are the sentiments expressed in a white paper released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation Latest News about Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of a campaign to raise consumer awareness of some of the dangerous terms found in End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs), commonly found on the Internet as "click-through agreements."

According to the author of the white paper, EFF policy analyst Annalee Newitz, overly broad EULAs in the high tech industry are one of the greatest threats to consumer rights.

She said that few people realize that simply visiting a Web site Get a Free E-Commerce Start-up Kit from Verisign or downloading a software update may constitute agreeing to a EULA that permits third parties to monitor their communications or allows a vendor to dictate what they can or cannot do with the product they've bought.

Some companies -- including Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft -- make the invasion of a user's privacy a condition of future upgrades of a product, she maintained.

"They ask the user to agree to allow the vendor to periodically look onto your computer and see if you have the appropriate software or you need an update," she told TechNewsWorld.

"The problem is," she continued, "the user is left in a situation where their computer is being accessed by a third party, and they don't know when, and they have no control over it. But in order to get valuable updates, they have to agree to that term in the EULA."

She also noted the terms in the EULAs used by some computer game Latest News about computer games makers.

"In their End User Licensing Agreement, you agree that the company can look at files on your hard drive and take screen shots of what's happening on your computer and send them back to the company, which is just ridiculous," she observed.

EULAs have been around for more than 20 years, Newitz noted, "but it's only in the last three or four years that we've seen so many terms coming into them which are such flagrant violations of privacy, and also asking people to sign away rights that they have under federal law."

"There has definitely been a trend toward making these agreements more and more ridiculous," she declared."