Privacy and GrandCentral?

May 9, 2008 5:33 PM

I am thinking of using GrandCentral for my telephone needs, and want to know the safety and privacy of the service.

I have already read the Terms of Use, and am pretty sure that they won't use my data for anything, but I am not good at reading things like this, and they have this weird part in it which concerns me.
"COMMUNICATIONS WITH GRANDCENTRAL
Subscriber may provide information, including but not limited to feedback, data, answers, questions, comments, suggestions, plans and ideas to GrandCentral. Such information shall be deemed non-confidential and GrandCentral assumes no obligation to protect such information from disclosure. The submission of such information to GrandCentral shall in no way prevent the purchase, manufacture, or use of similar products, services, plans and ideas by GrandCentral for any purpose whatever. GrandCentral shall be free to reproduce, use, disclose and distribute such information to others without restriction. Subscribers shall have no recourse against GrandCentral for alleged infringement or misappropriation in connection with any information or materials submitted to GrandCentral hereunder."
(here)
Is anybody with legal experience (or somebody who is good at reading these things) able to demystify my rights?

posted by ooklala to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

IANAL, but I am a user.

Here's my interpretation: "If you send us ideas we like, we might use them. We won't pay you if we do."
posted by cmiller at 6:17 PM on May 9, 2008

Response by poster: But does that apply to the calls? What can they do with my calls?
posted by ooklala at 6:38 PM on May 9, 2008

I don't think this says anything about your calls. Well, it covers any sort of communication with Grand Central, but they don't offer customer service by phone, do they? Anyway, it seems to me (IANAL) that this is pretty clearly only about communication with Grand Central themselves, not with anybody else.
posted by winston at 6:52 PM on May 9, 2008

Pretty clear that it does not include your phone calls. The clause begins with "Subscriber may provide," which, in the context of the rest of the clause, is most reasonably construed as voluntary provision by you of "information," which, in turn, is partially defined as "feedback, data, etc." The only even potentially worrisome word there is "data" (since that may be construed as e.g. phone call recording); however, the rest of the words counsel very strongly against that reading - feedback, answer, comments, questions, etc. all relate to customer feedback and quality assurance. So, in short: provision of any information is voluntary by you, the subscriber; there is no indication that GrandCentral will itself collect any such information; and, at any rate, the "information" seems to be limited to anything pertaining to customer feedback and quality assurance. Don't fret.
posted by detune at 7:06 PM on May 9, 2008

Response by poster: What about other parts I might have missed?
posted by ooklala at 8:21 PM on May 9, 2008

If you're concerned about privacy, you can use the Gizmo encrypted voip client with GrandCentral for your inbound and outbound calls.
posted by zippy at 1:56 PM on May 10, 2008

I think it is also worth noting that they recently had an outage which lasted at least a full morning, resulting in no one being able to receive phone calls.

So if you are using it for any kind of business communications, you might want to look into your rights if they cause you to lose business because your customers (or boss or whomever) can't reach you.
posted by IndigoRain at 10:31 PM on May 10, 2008