According to a New York Times article from 2014, over a third of all internet sites have "Forced Arbitration" clauses, and "Class-Action Ban" clauses.
This week, one hundred and forty three million Americans learned that a site that collects private information without consent had been hacked. A few days before the announcement was released, the same company (to the best of my belief) started television advertising of its own proprietary service to protect its paying subscribers from identity theft.
Following the announced breach, potential users of the site are also being encouraged to register with the site in order to discover whether or not their own information was part of the leak.
If you set up an account with that service, you explicitly agree that you will not take part in a class action lawsuit against that site.
How's that? (!!!)
Talking of fine print, The Manward Press (and this does look like an advertisement) suggests that every cellphone user should read the fine print. There's more. And more.
Here's a site with a short cut to the fine print you may never have noticed.
http://showthefineprint.org
And finally, alien romance publishers (in fact, almost all book publishers) make use of fine print, too, and most book "users" never notice it. It's called the front matter, and it is on the first or second or third page, and it informs readers who owns the copyright of the work, and it forbids copying, publishing, distributing the work without written permission from the copyright owner.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
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Speaking of fine print: I once pointed out to a co-worker the warning that appears in the front of many paperbacks, cautioning against the sale of "stripped books." He/she had never noticed it. Few people outside the industry are probably even aware of the "stripping" custom, which I've always considered an abomination. In what other business can a retailer effectively destroy an unsold product and get a refund for it from the manufacturer?! (One of my husband's first jobs was delivering shipments of newspapers and paperbacks to stores. He regularly brought home stripped books for our reading pleasure.)
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