Contracts can't be changed online without notice, court rules
Companies must notify customers before changing terms
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July 27, 2007 (Computerworld) <http://www.computerworld.com> -- A federal
appeals court has ruled that companies can't change their contracts and post
those revisions online without notifying customers first.
The ruling <http://pub.bna.com/eclr/0675424_071807.pdf>
http://pub.bna.com/eclr/0675424_071807.pdf by the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit paves the way for Joe Douglas, a customer of telephone
company Talk America, to file a class-action suit against the company. Talk
America has since merged with Cavalier Telephone in Richmond, Va. Cavalier
could not be reached for comment.
The issue of how companies service customers online as well as how they use
their personal information after mergers or acquisitions is one that privacy
experts and others have been grappling with since the emergence of
e-commerce in the 1990s.
'Parties to a contract have no obligation to check the terms on a periodic
basis to learn whether they have been changed by the other side,' the court
wrote. This ruling has consequences for many online businesses, which took
for granted their right to do this.
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