Yup. It doesn't even have to be a contract in order to have legal consequences.
Wizards of the Coast made a public announcement back in the 90s that they would not reprint cards on the reserved list in Magic: The Gathering. Even though they're now owned by Hasbro, they're still afraid of a lawsuit from collectors and trading shops if they do reprints or functional reprints (because that would drop the value of existing collections, causing material damages).
They toyed with non-playable collector editions for a few years, and then even that was shut down.
Right, and that's a challenge with privacy in general, whether or not there's a contract (and whether or not that's scoped to apply to future owners of the company).
Right now, the legal system does not always afford breaches and violations of privacy the level of gravitas that they deserve.
Given that personal data is bought and sold every day by various parties, it should be possible to put a dollar value on a particular piece of information (e.g. address, gender, demographic info). I'm not surprised this hasn't happened yet though since it would make assessing damages in privacy breaches much easier for the victims/users and open the door to more lawsuits.
The challenge in this case is assessing the dollar value of a new piece of personal info (room geometry). Perhaps there should be a small floor value (priced in $/byte) for any personal data when assessing damages - it would greatly discourage collecting novel data about users "for future use" or "just because we can".
Edit: "anonymized" data can be discounted based on an expert assessment of how easy it is to de-anonymize.
What a species. We elevate, or have been so conditioned to elevate, corporations that one of the scummiest of them, restricting arbitrarily the supply of a bit of paper and ink, is defended by our legal system. We're doomed.
> What a species. We elevate, or have been so conditioned to elevate, corporations that one of the scummiest of them, restricting arbitrarily the supply of a bit of paper and ink, is defended by our legal system. We're doomed.
This makes no sense to me as a criticism, because (a) the legal situation would be entirely identical if Magic: The Gathering were produced by a single individual, and (b) Wizards is refraining from printing more cards in response to pressure from the collectors.
Wizards of the Coast made a public announcement back in the 90s that they would not reprint cards on the reserved list in Magic: The Gathering. Even though they're now owned by Hasbro, they're still afraid of a lawsuit from collectors and trading shops if they do reprints or functional reprints (because that would drop the value of existing collections, causing material damages).
They toyed with non-playable collector editions for a few years, and then even that was shut down.