| I found their EULA, and it has some crazy stuff in it. For instance, they can terminate your account becase: ...
8) to manage any risk of loss to us, a User, or any other person; or 9) for other reasons. And if they terminate the account they can keep all the money they owe you. Also, it claims contractor aren’t their employees. Instead they are “unsecured creditors”. There’s also a bunch of stuff about how they can pass chargebacks through to sellers, and if you already withdrew the money, you have to deposit it back into your account. It looks like the business model is to force skilled laborers to work under pseudonyms so that Freelancer has complete ownership of the contractor’s reputation and professional credentials. I’m shocked that this is a thing! The Eula claims on one hand that they’re not a party to the contracts, but they go to great lengths to make sure the contractor and the employee don’t share their real world identities with each other (they even audit the contents of the files produced as part of the job, eavesdrop on audio/video/text chat/emails/etc). I think this forces them to become a payment intermediary, which means they do have to deal with lots of thorny issues. Welcome to the sharing economy, I guess. Link: https://www.freelancer.com/info/plainterms.html |
Apparently, there is no repercussion for putting non-enforcable conditions in an EULA, so companies are encouraged to throw as much self-serving protection language in there as possible in the off chance that it will stick.