Can my landlord require me to agree to third-party terms of service if they install a smart lock on my door during my lease? I am in the middle of my current fixed-term lease and have always had a mechanical key-based lock on my apartment door. My landlord has announced that the doors of all apartments will shortly be converted to electronic &quot;smart locks&quot;. The smart-lock maker's website says that any use of their product constitutes agreement to their terms of service. Is the landlord allowed to install this new type of lock? How does responsibility divide among myself, the landlord, and the smart-lock maker? My concerns are: Smart locks raise new reliability, security, and privacy risks versus mechanical locks. When I agreed to rent the apartment, mechanical locks were in use and no indication was given that they would be replaced. See this article on tenants who have objected to installation of smart locks. When the smart lock is installed, I will have no choice but to use it in order to access my apartment for the remainder of my lease. It seems unfair for me to be bound by the smart-lock maker's terms of service when my use of their product is non-consensual. If the terms of service are viewed as a contract, I see a few possible arguments: A. There is no meeting of the minds because I have no desire to use their product. B. The obligations imposed on me (and limitations on their liability) in the terms of service are void for lack of consideration because the ability to access my apartment, which the lock provides, is something I am already entitled to by my lease, i.e., it is being used to fulfill an existing obligation of the landlord. C. The landlord cannot require me to take on additional obligations to a third party in order to continue the enjoyment of the apartment promised by my already-signed lease, so the landlord must indemnify me from any such obligations. What are my rights and how can I assert them? If I cannot prevent the smart-lock installation, can I somehow establish that I am not bound by the terms of service despite what the smart-lock maker's website says? Would I simply wait until such time (if ever) that I have a dispute with the smart-lock maker, and then use my non-consent to argue that the terms neither protect them nor bind me? How strong would that argument be, and what if anything should I do now to document that non-consent?
Your lease states what your rights and obligations are: you cannot unilaterally change those terms, nor can the landlord. Providing a functioning lock on the door is a statutory obligation of the landlord, and the landlord gets to say what kind of lock is installed as long as the device functions, and isn't impossible for the tenant to operate. If the landlord replaces the lock with a no-security $10 entry door knob that yields to a screwdriver, they probably failed in their obligation to provide entry security. Failing such a concern, you don't have a legal right to refuse the landlord's choice of lock. You also do not take on the obligation to acquire the tools needed for installation, and so on. In short, you don't have a choice. Since you have no choice and you are not a party in this transaction (the landlord is not acting as your agent, he is satisfying a legal obligation that he has), the question of &quot;agreeing&quot; to someone else's transaction and contract is irrelevant. The landlord, as purchaser, must comply with the terms of the contract since he is a party to the contract. The seller might impose an obligation on the buyer and the landlord might hope to pass those terms on to the tenant via a lease term, but that can't be done unilaterally in the middle of a lease.
My answer would be different if either Alice or Bob was the landlord, or the landlord had a separate agreement with Alice and Bob. If a single lease is written, per the comment, that Alice and Bob are components of "the tenants", and "the tenants" have rented the named premises, then they all have equal rights to occupy the whole premises under the lease. If the landlord is professional I will further presume they all have joint and several liability for the whole rent; it would be inequitable to alienate Alice with joint and several liability from any part of the premises without her consent. If there is a separate roommate agreement that allocates rooms and expected share of rent or controls behaviors, then that is a contract that can form as a meeting of the minds of the roommates where they each trade something of value, such as exclusive use of a room. The narrative suggests an original verbal agreement that Bob would like to change. That's nice but Alice doesn't have to agree; or can agree with other changes of value to her such as the ratio of expected rent reflecting the ratio of use and access to the space Alice would have.
You would report unpermitted lock replacement to the home owner. The building code regulates new construction and renovations, and is not a requirement of any and all residences. This seems to correspond to a "secondary suite", which is supposed to be registered with the city (if it is allowed in your city). Here is a link for Vancouver, for instance. Such suites are supposed to be registered and inspected, the inspection being carried out by Development, Building and Licencing: By-Law Compliance &amp; Administration (a division of the city government). This article discusses some of the legal problems that can arise from an illegal secondary suite, however the penalties would land on the property owner, and he may not have approved of this subletting or the basement suite. A less-nuclear first step would therefore be reporting it to the property owner.
Theft is of course illegal in all US states, and pretty much every other jurisdiction. In the US that is a matter of state law, not federal. It could be reported to the local police, but it might be hard to prove. Both landlord/tenant law and privacy law are largely matters of state law in the US, not federal law. Such laws vary a good deal in different states. In many states a landlord is allowed to enter the rented premises, usually on "reasonable" notice, or without notice if there is an emergency. If the landlord actually lives in another part of the house, and simply rents a room to the tenant, the landlord may be able to enter the room more freely than if it was a separate apartment or house. In many cases where there is a written lease or rental agreement, it will specify under what conditions the landlord or landlord's agent may enter, and how much notice is required. What does the lease in the current case say about that?
It's hard to imagine a jurisdiction where this would be legal, assuming that the facts are as you present them. Mainly, it comes down to what the lease actually says. If the lease says something that implies that landlord permission is required, then the tenant has to get permission. You can call it a &quot;dog permit&quot;, it just boils down to &quot;landlord permission&quot;. Unless the lease also states &quot;permission for a pet can be withdrawn at any time, sor any reason&quot; or something to that effect, then the dog is permitted. At the end of the lease term, the landlord can refuse to renew the lease and/or can instead offer a no-dogs lease. The landlord's only recourse would be to petition the court for breaking the lease, in having a dog without permission, at which point the tenant would present whatever evidence they have that there was permission (hopefully something more substantial than a statement &quot;I asked if I could bring my dog and the landlord said 'hmmmm' with an approving tone&quot;). The courts will not give any credence to &quot;Yeah but I rescinded the permission&quot; unless there is a clause that explicitly allows it.
Simply being confusing is not enough to make a contract unenforceable. The law generally operates on the premise that people can understand statutes, regulations and contracts, and that if they don't understand a contract, they won't agree to it. Therefore, if they agreed, they understood: this is a fundamental premise of contract law. However, there are a couple of loopholes, &quot;unconscionability&quot; and &quot;public policy&quot;, which could provide an escape. In the proposed scenario, we would assume that there is a huge difference in bargaining power between the customer and company, that some term is unfair (a highly subjective matter reduced to expressions like &quot;shocks the conscience&quot;), and the language of the contract is clearly confusing. &quot;Public policy&quot; generally involves a requirement in a contract that is statutorily prohibited: either the required action is itself illegal, or the law has banned any such clauses in a contract (very commonly, residential leases are statutorily prohibited from including clauses waiving statutory protections of rights). I think that if a contract for some internet thing (e.g. an ISP) had a clause that &quot;unahitaji kukulipa $1 kwa kila siku unayotumia huduma zetu&quot; (you must pay $1 for every day you use the service) that this is not a shocking price, so the contract would be enforceable, even if it ought to be a bit confusing.
No, you're not required to sign any contracts. But since you're offering a service, you do have to manage some compliance tasks. You are a data controller under the UK GDPR, regardless of whether you have a company. This brings with it various compliance requirements. For example, you MUST post a privacy notice in accordance with Art 13 GDPR that explains how you process user's information. You must sign data processing agreements with your data processors, such as your server providers. And you should reconsider transfers of data to the US, since such transfers are illegal or at least quite questionable in the wake of the 2020 Schrems II ruling. You now have prospective users that are asking you for an Art 28 data processing agreement (DPA). These are likely other organizations that are data controllers of their own. For them to use your browser extension, they either need to find a legal basis that allows them to share their user's/employee's data with you (controller to controller transfer), or they need you to act as their data processor (controller to processor transfer). The third alternative is not to use your plugin at all. Of these, a C2P arrangement is most convenient for these other orgs, but involves a bit of paperwork to set up first. If you want to act as their processor, this doesn't mean you'd have to create a company (though a corporation might be very desirable as a liability shield). Being a processor means that you're contractually bound to only use the personal data as instructed by the controller, and not for your own purposes. This restricts what you can do, and has some special compliance requirements. For example, you cannot engage new subprocessors without your controller's approval. However, processor status can also be convenient for you because you're not responsible for interacting with the controller's data subjects, e.g. you're not responsible for handling their data subject access requests. Note that it's possible to simultaneously be a controller for some users, and a processor for others. E.g. Google Docs is offered directly to users as a B2C product so that Google is a controller, but also as a B2B product as Google Workspace, where Google acts as a data processor. Personally, I'd rather not sign any contracts unless I'm doing it as a business, and adequately compensated for providing this service. GDPR is only one compliance aspect out of many, making it unwise to offer a SaaS product as a hobby. For example, copying other people's web content has copyright implications… A potential alternative for some of the organizations asking you might be to make it possible for them to self-host your backend, so that they are not required to rely on you as a data processor. If you have no plans to commercialize your software, making it Open Source could be a solution. But you're in no way required to do that if you don't want to.
Before you go changing locks, you might want to hire an attorney. There is law in Ohio that governs "such" relationship, which are typically landlord-tenant relationships, but might not be strictly construed the way you'd prefer. In a classic landlord-tenant relationship, it is illegal to change locks on a tenant, and if you want a tenant booted out, you have to go through the court process and get the court to order an eviction (carried out by the sheriff). A landlord-tenant relationship need not involve a written lease, all that matters is having an agreement. On the face of it, it looks to me as though you agreed to let your son live there, and his attorney would no doubt point to whatever benefit you received from allowing your son to live there as "consideration" in this verbal (vague) contract. The exact terms of that contract don't matter: what matters is that state law limits what you can do. You can read ORC here on the topic of evictions. Actually physically removing a person is a crime (battery), so definitely don't do that. Lockouts have been illegal since 1973. You no doubt can show the court that your son is now effectively a trespasser, but he clearly did not break in without permission, so the bottom line is probably a visit to the court (unless a letter from the attorney resolves the matter). Alternatively, it could be simpler and cheaper to just go directly for the court process. There are professionally-written manuals for about $20 that spell out the procedures, and an attorney is not actually required to evict someone. You can just treat the situation as a standard landlord-tenant process, give the required notices (using legalese in a notice may well be sufficient). If you do have to file in court, there are a couple hundred bucks of fees associated with filing. It takes time. There is a 3 day notice requirement on your notice, after that you can file the complaint and a hearing is scheduled after that (county dependent: I hear it's about 3 weeks in Franklin). Defendant can stretch that out for a week or so by asking for a continuance to seek legal counsel, but eventually you will prevail unless the judge is too warm-hearted and orders family counseling (you never know, these days). They you apply for the "red tag", the bailiff posts it within a few days, and that gives him 5 days to leave. If that doesn't work, you call the bailiff for the physical removal, and they probably respond within a couple of business days.