Home Security Company Says No One Linking To Its Website Is Allowed To Disparage It

With a federal law in place forbidding this sort of stuff, and an internet full of documentation detailing just how badly things go for companies that institute these policies, why on earth would ADT Security add this clause to its Terms of Use?

Hey @ADT! The answer is NO, and I'm quitting your service and going to a competitor. If you don't want bad reviews, try better prices and service, not this kind of shady legal garbage. pic.twitter.com/PcUnIqVabR

- scriptjunkie (@scriptjunkie1) December 3, 2017

For those of you who can't see the tweet, soon-to-be-former ADT customer scriptjunkie has been informed via dialog box ADT's Terms of Use have changed. ADT's Terms of Use contain a Streisand Precursor: if you link to ADT's site, you promise not to do several things, including:

Will not disparage ADT, ADT's products or services, or any of ADT's affiliates or their products or services

This isn't even legal in this day and age, but hiding it in a bunch of words users will likely never read is a great way to fly under the federal law radar. This, of course, only lasts until someone points it out on the internet and, while linking to ADT's site, points out the clause is stupid, the company is stupid for deploying it, and the company's lawyers are just as stupid for suggesting it/signing off on it.

To be fair, ADT's stupid non-disparagement clause isn't part of the update scriptjunkie received. The moronic "promise" it extracts from site linkers dates back to at least 2014. It predates the federal law banning these clauses, which makes its pre-2016 existence somewhat explicable. But that doesn't explain why it hasn't been removed to make the Terms of Use federal law-compliant.

Considering the amount of effort it would take (next to none) to remove this from the site's Terms of Use, its continued existence is perplexing, especially in light of ADT's repeated promise to remove the clause. At the time of this writing, more than 16 hours have passed since ADT promised to remove it and the clause still exists on the Terms of Use page. Even more perplexing is ADT's explanation/apology, which is actually neither.

We also value your honest opinion and have built our company around implementing our customers' feedback. The non-disparagement clause you are referencing only applies to linking to our website and is not a condition of service or using ADT.com.

While it's nice to know ADT isn't preventing people from disparaging the company without linking to its site, trying to prevent them from doing so while linking isn't any better. Review sites tend to provide links to company websites, making third-party reviews a potential violation of this clause.

But even if we take ADT's explanation at face value, we're still left with its questionable decision to insert this language anywhere in any explicit or implicit agreement with site visitors and/or customers. No business should ever take this indefensible position, especially not after it's been made statutorily explicit these agreements are considered invalid -- and illegal -- by the federal government.