Overview
In an opinion Wednesday, Judge Oetken ruled that it was not unconscionable for UnrollMe, a provider of free software to help unsubscribe consumers from unwanted email, to enforce the users' agreement to allow the company to use or sell their data, at least on an anonymized basis -- notwithstanding that people may not like this sort of arrangement:
[W]hile UnrollMe’s conduct may seem unconscionable in the colloquial sense, Plaintiffs have not shown that it is unconscionable in the legal sense. On the procedural front, the mere fact that the privacy policy is a dense take-it-or-leave-it contract does not render it procedurally unconscionable. Nor was there a lack of meaningful choice: one could simply close the browser window and not use UnrollMe . . . . It is probably true that UnrollMe’s unwitting consumers simply wanted to clean up their inboxes. But it is also true that those consumers agreed to the Faustian bargain that undergirds much of the internet: you give me a free service, and I suppress the knowledge that you are probably selling my data to digital touts. We may not like it, but it is not per se unlawful.Judge Rakoff enforced a similar take-or-leave-it online agreement relating to Uber, but only reluctantly, as we recently covered here.
