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Terms of Service: contact on termination
Clause 4 "Termination" of the Terms of Service contain this paragraph:
You agree that if you engage in any conduct that contravenes these Terms, your right to use the Service may be revoked without warning. If you have provided contact details (for example, by creating an account), you may be contacted to advise you of such revocation, but there shall be no obligation to do so.
This is another thing I personally find rather problematic: revocation should always come with a notification of such if at all possible. I have no problem with not creating a legal obligation of doing so at all cost, but I’ll expect the site to contact terminated users with the means it has at hand, if they at all work.
2 answers
We generally attempt to contact users. We can't guarantee that the address originally provided still works, or that our message won't be filtered by your email provider, but we do make the attempt -- in the usual case. However, for very abusive behavior -- such as somebody creating an account just to post spam, or creating an army of sockpuppets to engage in abusive behavior -- we want to reserve the right to just nuke the account and move on. (We have had DoS attacks and armies of spam accounts; this isn't theoretical.)
How could we phrase this to be more reassuring to "real" users, folks like you who post in good faith?
The word "may" is ambiguous in English, meaning either permission (you agree we can contact you) or uncertainty ("might"). That was an unfortunate phrasing on our part, sorry.
1 comment thread
This is a minor thing to nitpick about.
Read what it says: If you have provided contact details. You can't expect to be contacted if you haven't provided contact details.
Other than when it's not physically possible, this does exactly what you ask for. The wording says the site "may" contact you. Of course they'll try, but as you said yourself, it's better not to create a legal obligation to do so. Any wording that doesn't create a legal obligation has to be non-committal.
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