Last week, we reported on General Mills’ hilarious and sad attempt to make a Facebook Like legally binding. The reaction online was intense and hostile, so now General Mills is in full backpedal mode.
In a blog post almost as hilarious as the legal terms they tried to force on America, General Mills passive-aggressively tries to pretend that it’s not a big deal and they’ll totally go back to their old Privacy Policy:
General Mills recently posted a revised set of Legal Terms on our websites. Those terms – and our intentions – were widely misread, causing concern among consumers. We rarely have disputes with consumers – and arbitration would have simply streamlined how complaints are handled. Many companies do the same, and we felt it would be helpful.
As we noted when we covered this, arbitration is actually more “helpful” to the corporation that’s paying all the bills. Equally as funny is the part where General Mills claims this is common language and that they never expected such a severe and hostile reaction. Just so we don’t spend this entire post ragging on them, they do actually offer a sincere apology, and it does appear that they’ve changed their privacy policy back to its previous language.
All that said, really this is something General Mills should have seen coming. Telling consumers that you basically eat a product at their own risk is not exactly a positive, on-brand message you want to spread on Facebook. Still, chalk up a win for Internet outrage.