[clug] OT fire sale clause

Bryan Kilgallin bryan at netspeed.com.au
Tue Jun 30 03:17:51 MDT 2015


{The privacy policy for Hulu 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/hulu_llc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
a video-streaming service with about nine million subscribers, opens 
with a declaration that the company “respects your privacy.”

That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes 
bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in 
the policy <http://www.hulu.com/privacy>, the host of details that Hulu 
can gather about subscribers — names, birth dates, email addresses, 
videos watched, device locations and more — could be transferred to “one 
or more third parties as part of the transaction.” The policy does not 
promise to contact users if their data changes hands.

Provisions like that act as a sort of data fire sale clause. They are 
becoming standard among the most popular sites, according to a recent 
analysis by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United 
States as ranked by Alexa, an Internet analytics firm.

Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy 
policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, 
acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred, The 
Times’s analysis found. The sites with these provisions include 
prominent consumer technology companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, 
Google and LinkedIn, in addition to Hulu.}

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/technology/when-a-company-goes-up-for-sale-in-many-cases-so-does-your-personal-data.html

-- 
www.netspeed.com.au/bryan/



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