I am interested in buying up the user base from another site for my social classifieds website http://www.Jihoy.com, the other site will give up those users to me in exchange for cash. The problem I see, is that those users has agreed to the other site's user agreement, and did not agree to my user agreement, can I still take those users? Perhaps have them click approve for my user agreement after the acquistion? Or should I best not to bother with it?
i think users are just getting migrated. So if u agree to someone's condition that means u trust it. So i think it should be considered as mutual understanding
Usually, when people are building a list to market to , there is something that says that you agree to receive offers and information..and it's usually very broad. People sell their lists all the time, from yahoo when you sign up for free email, to your local DMV, and Real Estate title and mortgage companies. Without actually seeing the original TOS, I would venture to say that this is a very common practice online, and there should be no worries.
If the users found that their information was sold, they will sue the first owner of their information according to the privacy policy.
Since your User Agreement differs from the other site, you need to request the users to read the new User Agreement and accept it. By doing this, possibilities are there that you may lose some of them (if they are not willing to agree to the new Agreement). But from the legal point of view, you will be clean!
Absolutely illegal! Except if you didn't put few sentences into the privacy policy about it ... anyway it's not ethical - your members will hate you easily and leave your site.
It all depends on what is in the Privacy Policy of who you are buying from. If there is a clause that states something like "We will not sell of trade your information to third party vendors", then it's pretty obvious that it's certainly unethical, and possibly illegal depending on the rest of the policy. I agree that most people never read those things. but their ignorance doesn't clear you from liability. No one can give you a definitive answer without knowing how the list was built and what is in the other privacy policy. In my experience, I assume that people will sell the list, or that they will send me offers on behalf of other vendors.
How can you make that determination without seeing the Privacy Policy ? They are not all the same. Some are very up front that you agree to receive offers from 3rd party vendors.