Academia.edu's terms of service are so evil it's almost funny.

[johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz]

Academia.edu's terms of service are so evil it's almost funny. I'm surprised they don't make you give them your first-born son!

But it looks like they mean it. I'm reading people saying things like:

"I quit it when I got an email saying they had generated a podcast using AI based on one of my papers without my permission."

and

"I got off academia dot edu 5 or so years ago, when I discovered it was sending automatically-generated emails in my name without even telling me - I found out when a very senior member of the profession replied to one."

https://bsky.app/profile/aidanmcglynn.bsky.social/post/3lz2macyqm22a

[rpsu@mas.to]

@johncarlosbaez Under the European legislation this is not possible. For example voice is personally identifiable data and there is no such thing as irrevocable permit to use that sort of things for sales promotion purely based if you create an account on some random service.

The magic word is “GDPR”

If this is actually legal in USA the your laws are wrong.

#gdpr #personalData

[johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz]

@rpsu - While what academia.edu is doing is illegal in Europe, they're still trying to do it to us here in Scotland. Their terms of service here say:

"By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services."

Maybe you can see if they're different where you are:

https://www.academia.edu/terms

[rpsu@mas.to]

@johncarlosbaez Same here, LOL. Their legal people are incompetent or business people just do not give a shit.

Best part is that accessing T&C implicitly means user have had to accept the terms. That’s righty, to access to read the T&C you already agreed the shit 😂

[johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz]

@rpsu - my wife was trying to delete her Academia.edu account, which had gone dormant, and found that accessing her account in order to delete it required her to agree to the terms of service.

[lehtorituomo@mementomori.social]

@johncarlosbaez It seems like that. However, if one clicks "privacy policy" instead of accepting the terms, then it's possible to access the account settings from the menu and delete it. I deleted my account yesterday. Learned this tip from @JubalBarca, thanks!

@rpsu