I feel that answering any questions which could very well have legal consequences on Twitter is not a very smart idea. Legal questions are rarely well-answered in 140 chars, even if you're allowed to use emojis.
Definitely not a clear question. What if it only ha seatbelts in front but not back? What if they comply with EU regulations but not California regulations, or vice versa?
> “Does your food contain salt?”
Even less clear. Do you know about California prop 65? It is a fail of epic proportions, because "contain" may mean "has enough to cause an effect on an average human", "has enough to cause an effect on a human with extremely rare condition that makes him sensitive to salt orders of magnitude higher than a regular human" or "has enough to be detectable by the most sensitive detector created by modern science". That's even without getting into the weeds about how common table salt is not just sodium chloride, and sodium chloride may be present without adding table salt (many organisms have it so if you eat them you eat salt). Not try to pack it into 140 characters in a way that a hostile journalist can't make a scoop out of it. Good luck.
> If legalese is required that means the expected answer isn’t the same as the actual answer.
It's assuming there first of all is a simple yes/no answer to the question. An extreme example: Is it legal to shoot a person? Yes or no? Give me a yes or no answer! The answer is "sometimes, maybe, no and yes". I think it's weird that all of a sudden everyone knows enough about Common Carrier rules or OBC's to know what the implications of either a "yes" or a "no" in that case would be.
I personally have no idea. And after reading the article I still don't. Does the writer know? I couldn't see anything passed the sarcasm that would convince me either way.
I would expect more substance in an article on the front page of Hacker news.
If the answer "Are couriers covered by Common Cartier rules?" were "yes" it may have some caveats like: "Yes, but the protection cover only he items send by AirMule, not the personal items in the other bag. Also adding any item to the AirMule bag voids all the protection." [Just in case this is not clear, this is a fake quote.] [Also, check it with your lawyer.] I guess you can reduce it to 140 characters and get a proper lawyer to write it.
If the answer "Are couriers covered by Common Cartier rules?" were "no", the extension is: "No, totally no, 0%, zero, nada, zip!" [fake quote]
Their answers to "Are couriers covered by Common Cartier rules?" is something like: "They will get a seat in the plane and can use the bathroom." [Also, fake quote.] They are not replaying the question, only stating something unrelated.
There is no technical issue here preventing a clear answer due to 140 character limits.
These guys had my email address and could have sent a detailed response. Instead, they sent a short (but clear) one. If they actually wanted a phone interview, they could have asked for one and provided a number to call. And it's possible to send more than one tweet if they wanted to respond that way.
They did link to a FAQ which isn't clear, and their Terms of Service is posted on the page as others have noted. This is what raised my eyebrows to begin with and why I started asking questions.
A friend who is a tech reporter said "When they're responding like this, you know you got 'em." Given that Rory has had all morning to dispute any of the facts in my blog post, and has not done so despite being very active on Twitter, it seems clear that my reporter friend is right.
Pretty easy to link to a company FAQ. If somebody was asking Airbnb similarly serious questions about liability, just imagine if they weren't ready with an FAQ, and one of their execs tweeted in response to a question, "Hey, I'm at Costco at the moment!" Right.
Well, it looks like it's just a bunch of guys trying to get a company off the ground (pun slightly intended). In these cases "I'll route your request to our legal department" may mean "I'll reply to you from a different account after asking my lawyer friend about it at lunch" :) So there might not be any FAQ (hopefully, yet).
