A reminder on terms of use

The Legal Genealogist was privileged last night to participate in a discussion of the GEDmatch buyout by the forensic biotech firm Verogen.

Part of the Wacky Wednesday series by DearMYRTLE, the discussion is now archived and can be reviewed on YouTube.

And if there’s anything that came clear in that discussion, it’s that folks need to be reminded, one more time…

There are terms of use, or terms of service, or terms and conditions, or the rules of the road that govern each and every single solitary website we visit.

And we make a big mistake when we simply toss a checkmark into the box that appears for us to indicate we’ve read, understand and agree to those terms… when in fact we haven’t read them, don’t understand them, and wouldn’t necessarily agree to them at all.

So we’ll use the letter T in our 2019 alphabet soup for a reminder — a public service announcement, if you will — that we always need to pay attention to terms of use.

Terms of use, remember, are the limits somebody who owns something we want to see or copy or use puts on whether or not he’ll let us see or copy or use it. These are limits that are different from copyright protection, since the law says what is and isn’t copyrighted and we can own a thing without owning the copyright. So this isn’t copyright law; it’s contract law — we and whoever owns the thing we want to see or copy or use reach a deal: a website lets us access the site and its information and we agree to use it only in the ways the website says we can.¹

The phrase “terms of use” isn’t defined in the old legal dictionaries. The closest they come is the definition of “use” by Black to include “the right given to any one to make a gratuitous use of a thing belonging to another.”² Wikipedia, without citing a source, says terms of use, terms of service and terms & conditions are all the same thing (they are) and defines the phrase as “legal agreements between a service provider and a person who wants to use that service. The person must agree to abide by the terms of service in order to use the offered service.”³ That’s a pretty fair definition.

But, we might be thinking, if it’s rules, how can it be considered a contract? Nobody gave us a choice about the rules when we subscribed to, say, GenealogyBank.com or Ancestry.com, did they?

Actually, they did. Exactly the same kind of choice we have in a lot of things in life: take it or leave it. When we created an account with one of the many services we use around the web, commercial and non-commercial, there comes a point in the join-up or subscription process where there’s a button or a check box or something. It always says something like the example shown in the graphic: if we click on it or check the box, we’ve agreed to be bound by what the terms of use are.

It’s a little like our relationship with the TSA. We don’t have to go through security at the airport. Of course, that means we don’t fly, either.

Of all the websites we as genealogists ever use, the ones where the terms of use are most critical are the websites dealing with our DNA. That’s because terms of use don’t just dictate what we can do on the website — they also control what the website owners can do with our information: in this case, the information deep within our personal, individual, genetic codes.

On these — and on all websites we use and especially those where we provide personal information — we should never ever ever just check the box. Whether it’s the first time we’re signing up for a website or service or whether we’re being asked — as GEDmatch is asking now — that we agree to a change in the terms of use, our practice always has to be the same.

Read. Understand. And check only if we agree.

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “2019 alphabet soup: T is for …,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 12 Dec 2019).

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