> I think this is just poorly written, or written to fit all use cases.
You're almost certainly right, but I still think for legal documents this kind of argument needs to die. I'm really, really sick of being asked to be OK with agreements that give organizations significant, unnecessary levels of power simply because they say they won't misuse it. What are the consequences in place if Little League decides to misuse this data? This agreement removes any accountability or oversight from Little League's data handling.
Frankly, it's magical thinking. In the real world, organizations do corrupt things sometimes. Organizations accidentally leak data, they have bad actors, they get into conflicts and decide to stop operating in good faith. We shouldn't give those organizations blank checks to do so.
This kind of fuzzy "trust us" agreement is fine for something casual that parents are putting together, but it's not fine when it's an organization of this size. Because I guarantee that in the event of a scandal, if a Little League was ever sharing personal information with advertisers, this contract would get trotted out during the lawsuit to argue that the defendants couldn't sue. I don't believe for a second that a Little League wouldn't look at the letter of the contract in that situation rather than the "spirit" of the contract.
So even in situations where an org isn't actively trying to take advantage of you, it's harmful for contracts to have this kind of language. Often this language is genuinely only put in because some lawyer somewhere recommended it, often nobody is trying to take advantage of anyone. But even so, legal documents are not gentleperson's agreements, and we shouldn't treat them that way, we should treat them seriously.
It's OK for you to acknowledge that the agreement probably doesn't have malicious intent. It's not OK for someone to argue that not having malicious intent makes the agreement acceptable.
> It's OK for you to acknowledge that the agreement probably doesn't have malicious intent. It's not OK for someone to argue that not having malicious intent makes the agreement acceptable.
Indeed. And attorneys and "template documents" are the biggest culprit here. Every legal person gets a thrill writing the most evil one-sided legal document then pushes it to the company which uses it since "it comes from legal". 99% of the people just sign it since "legal" doesn't agree to changes.
I've had multiple companies/people utterly confused as to how I wouldn't sign their one-sided "standard" agreement contract.
You're almost certainly right, but I still think for legal documents this kind of argument needs to die. I'm really, really sick of being asked to be OK with agreements that give organizations significant, unnecessary levels of power simply because they say they won't misuse it. What are the consequences in place if Little League decides to misuse this data? This agreement removes any accountability or oversight from Little League's data handling.
Frankly, it's magical thinking. In the real world, organizations do corrupt things sometimes. Organizations accidentally leak data, they have bad actors, they get into conflicts and decide to stop operating in good faith. We shouldn't give those organizations blank checks to do so.
This kind of fuzzy "trust us" agreement is fine for something casual that parents are putting together, but it's not fine when it's an organization of this size. Because I guarantee that in the event of a scandal, if a Little League was ever sharing personal information with advertisers, this contract would get trotted out during the lawsuit to argue that the defendants couldn't sue. I don't believe for a second that a Little League wouldn't look at the letter of the contract in that situation rather than the "spirit" of the contract.
So even in situations where an org isn't actively trying to take advantage of you, it's harmful for contracts to have this kind of language. Often this language is genuinely only put in because some lawyer somewhere recommended it, often nobody is trying to take advantage of anyone. But even so, legal documents are not gentleperson's agreements, and we shouldn't treat them that way, we should treat them seriously.
It's OK for you to acknowledge that the agreement probably doesn't have malicious intent. It's not OK for someone to argue that not having malicious intent makes the agreement acceptable.