Is Microsoft Licensing Forcing Banks To Break The Law?
from the when-laws-and-EULAs-collide dept
Oops. It appears that any bank that uses Microsoft operating systems may be breaking the law. Someone who actually (oh my!) read the fine print on the Microsoft EULA has discovered it requires users who enable the “auto update” feature to allow Microsoft access to information on the system – which violates a law, soon to go into effect, not allowing access by third parties to information without the consent of whoever’s data it is. Of course, there is a pretty simple solution (besides ditching Microsoft altogether) which is not to use the auto-update feature. Anyway, honestly, this seems like much more of a nitpick on bad language choices by Microsoft’s lawyers in not clearly defining what they mean by allowing “access to information” on the system.
Comments on “Is Microsoft Licensing Forcing Banks To Break The Law?”
Lawyers don't make bad word choices
Unless they’re bad lawyers (and Microsoft does not have bad lawyers) they didn’t make bad word choices. The absolute essence of what lawyers do is to consider every word of a document and what it’s ramifications are. And it’s not like this is one exception that slipped through, the fact of the matter is Microsoft documents and EULAs are constantly trying to take big things little by little without us noticing. Do I think that Microsoft plans on using the things you agree in the EULA to look over every file on your hard drive? Of course not, but time and again they show that they want to be able to do things even if they never actually do them.
Pharma & Healthcare companies have same issue...
… due to new HIPAA regulations. Most are apparently are just choosing to ignore it.