Photo Credit :tinasilva20 

The documentary shows how the government control is different in the digital age. The big difference is that companies collect the information on their users. They do it for themselves, for profit. The government doesn’t need to collect the information about people for themselves anymore. Now it just fights for its ability to access the information. And there is constant legal conflict between the companies and the government about that.

Our economy right now is following Keynesian ideas about allowing government control and intervention in the economy. This relation between the companies and the information about people brings government and companies (market, economies) closer together.
Because of this relation, “We the people” don’t really have much power to control our information if we want to participate in digital communication, which is impossible not to do in this time. We need Internet, phone, computers, and networks to exist in this world. If you don’t participate in digital networks it is very difficult to get a job and you lose communication to most of the world. In today’s world government has power and also companies’ power has increased greatly while the individual person has lost power. The reasons the government and companies want people’s information are different, but neither is good for people themselves. The government says that they want the information to prevent terrorism and other threats, whereas companies want it to make profit by selling it or using it to sell you other things. It’s not good for the people because government can decide what they think is a threat and arrest you for something that isn’t really a threat. For example, in the documentary there was a guy who got detained in the airport for whatever he tweeted about America. He mentioned “destroying America” where he meant partying hard but government decided he really was going to destroy the country. This is a perfect example of how government surveillance of our participation in social media affects people’s well-being and freedom. This is the one thing that shocked me because common sense should have been used to solve that problem. If a terrorist wants to destroy America, he/she won’t go on social media and post about it.

Another thing that caught my attention was the scene about protests where they government arrested the some of the protesters before they started to protest because what they might have done. They decided that those people were a threat just because they were posting about it online. “The activists didn’t need to commit any crime, they just needed a text, to email and to call each other about potentially protester” (Sherry Turkle, Terms and Conditions May Apply, 57:20-57:27) And this is scary because it seems like it violates the rights to protest and free speech.

Another scary part in the documentary was when they talk about Terms and Conditions of the companies’ services. Companies intentionally make them obfuscatory so that people won’t really read them.  In the documentary, they mentioned that Instagram can sell your pictures but most people probably don’t notice that in the Terms and Conditions.

To summarize my post, the documentary really scared me, and made me consider canceling all of my social media accounts. But at the same time, it is difficult for me because I feel like I’ll lose so many connections that I have built through the years. It is really scary to know that government and the companies have all sorts of personal information about me, and that they’re profiting from my free labor. I feel used. All this made me think that I would more carefully post my opinions or pictures on social media.

This is an interesting article I find. –> Scorecard: How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost?

Questions:

1.Why doesn’t government use common sense before disrupting someone’s life?
2. Would the companies be less profitable if they use simple, not too long Terms and Conditions for their services? 

Let me just tell you that we do not have a choice. You use cell phone every day in order to connect with your family members, friends, class mates, find the closest coffee shop, send an email to your professor and make a cute selfie for your boyfriend. Let’s imagine that you have read the entire policy of AT&T Company and figured out that your privacy would be violated. You did not signed any contracts and went to T-Mobile store across the street. Guess what? They would have approximately the same private policy and you would have to put your signature and accept their terms or lose the connection with your entire world.

System of government control knows who you are, where you live and work, how you spent your weekends and what fashion style you prefer. And, obviously, there is a clear relationship/connection with the economic system. First, “they” tell you what you should buy in order to feel happy or satisfied, then “they” will collect all the necessary information about you and finally “they” would produce something you would buy and make a profit for “them”. Does it affect your well-being and freedom? Of course, it does. Can you actually do something about it? Not really…Well, you can delete your Facebook and Instagram profiles but your friends would not be able to find out what type of sandwich you had for lunch and how angry you felt after the last president election. You will finally realize that you live in one big illusion and nothing is real: you don’t have real friends, real connections, real interests and real yourself. You will not survive my friend, so stop thinking about it.

Nothing was surprising or even shocking for me from the documentary. I am Russian, and I believe in conspiracy theory my entire life. I was concerned about “red flagging” part. First of all, this guy who twitted that he would bomb America is just stupid and I do not feel sorry for him at all. It’s obvious that sometimes we should use our brain. Eleven year old kid, who is an expert in politics, should play outside with his friends, not writing a nonsense post about Obama and his safety. Googling on “how to murder you wife” or “what is the best place to bury a dead body” is maybe useful, but not productive, because “they” will see it and, eventually, you will get caught. If you want to kill someone, do it quietly.

OK…now I have a question. If it’s so easy to predict the crime using digital technologies, why do we still have to deal with terrorism? I would not share my opinion about it, because I do not want some weird looking dude to knock on my door tomorrow morning. See, I kept my thoughts to myself and my privacy is not violated.

Questions:

• Do you personally feel that your privacy and civil rights are being violated? What would you like to change in our modern digital society in order to feel more comfortable and safe?
• Imagine, that you work for google, Facebook or any other company that collect personal data from users. Will you be more interested in making more money for your company and yourself or keeping people’s privacy unviolated would be your priority?#behonest

You’re signing up for a new service, you’re asked to read the terms and conditions. A screen pops up with 12+ pages long, entailing a dense document that you must agree to in order to proceed to using a service. But who actually reads it? What are we checking yes to?

Terms and Conditions may apply breaks down the items that we had signed up for, and the information that we have signed away to platforms such as Facebook and Google. You let them know where you live, what you do for a living, where you go to school. This gives each server information about your economic standing, which allows target advertisements based on how much money you have or make.

We also don’t take into account that we allow the government to track our searches on Google. Our locations, emails, online documents are not private. The terms & conditions allow the government to have the information from us.

We feel that we are free in our searches and internet uses, however we are handing off a large amount of power to our government. We give away our privacy, and it fuels the power of law enforcement, the FBI, etc. We have given them the right to pre-emptively arrest people.  We are monitored, without even thinking that we are monitored. We are essentially lab rights, and we are ignorant to our own presence.

A notable part of the documentary was when Mark Zuckerburg asked “Are you guys recording?”. “Yes.” they replied. His reply was “Will you not, please?”

A man with major social influence and success, a platform that monitors everyone’s existence, asked if he could not be filmed. When you create a large network of people, and sign away their rights to the government, you must be incredibly aware of how internet surveillance takes a tole. And thats why he asked to not be recorded.

Another part that I found interesting is the fact that since Hoback only pretended to comply with Zuckerburg’s request, isn’t that exactly the point he was trying to prove? Mark requested privacy, but Hoback didn’t give it to him. Not sure if the hypocrisy was intended, but I thought it was a very interesting part of the documentary.

A massive realization of the documentary that I find incredibly important, is the fact that the issues do not lie with Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. The problem is with us, and how apathetic we are to the fact that we know that we are giving these rights away, and we do it anyway. We don’t think about it regularly, but we are society’s own downfall.

1. Knowing that you are giving your rights away to servers, do you feel less inclined to blindly agree to the terms & conditions?
2. What would make you stop having an internet presence all together?

Through the internet, our main online corporations work with the government. In this documentary, it is shown that the economic systems work with our government to keep surveillance on people. The biggest companies are Google and Facebook.

Many online users nowadays do not worry as much about their privacy. They are so used to simply hitting this button, not realizing what this can potentially entail. This documentary shows us that the government inquires about many online users through these big corporations. Most privacy agreements are extremely lengthy causing us not want to read it. Is this a coincidence? These corporations most likely know that the average person will not spend their time reading this extremely length due to them being desperate to be online.

The power in our society is unfortunately not distributed equally. Our government persuades corporations to leak and/or sell our personal information. This is by no means fair.

How many times do you bother reading the privacy terms? Do you know that the terms and conditions you didn’t read could be part of your complacency in having your privacy misused? It is time you know that there could be a third eye having a good share of your interaction with the internet. The information contained in most companies regarding terms and conditions could be long and tiring to read but perhaps it could be an intentional ploy to surveil on you. However, you have the power at your finger tips before hitting the “Accept” or “Agree” button by reading the whole privacy terms next time.

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From the documentary it is evident that the economic systems conspire with the system of the government to surveil our interaction over the internet. Many corporate companies such as Facebook and Google are collaborating with the government to have our information shared. These companies purposely make their privacy terms lengthy and in most cases an average person readily accepts the terms without knowing its content. Moreover, the online shops we visit often sell our information to the government against our wish in the name of “threat” to national security. Government agencies are increasingly becoming friendly with the social networks in which they readily collaborate with one another in sharing our personal information.

It’s unfortunate that power is distributed unevenly in this society. The government being the powerful part of this society can afford to persuade companies to sell it our personal information without our consent. We as the ordinarily people we are thrown out of this deal with little power to negotiate for our privacy since the trust we accord those companies is being undermined by the influence of the powerful facets of our society. Hence, with the uneven distribution of power, our well being and freedom is negatively impacted with the gradual loss of our privacy.

Shocking facts from the documentary:

1. The Tom-Tom has been selling their consumer information in helping the police in Netherlands to set up speed traps, an indication of companies sharing our information with the surveillance agencies.
2. The installation of Carrier IQ software in every Smartphone that can keep us virtually tracked by capturing every single key stroke, often used by the FBI, which is utterly a violation of our privacy.
3. The ability of the government to red flag everything we search online such as a writer who was red flagged for searching on ways to develop his show as a potential murderer.

It is really prudent to read diligently to what we are consenting to by ensuring that next time we remember to read the privacy terms with the companies we interact with under the increasing mass surveillance. Nonetheless, it is worrying knowing how our privacy is gradually dying in the face of increasing mass surveillance in this digital era.

Questions

1. How often do you read the privacy policy before pressing the “Accept” or “Agree” button?
2. What actions are you going to take in regard to your online behaviour after knowing your information are being shared?

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We have studied before how our “private” information is not so private and we have learned how our data is being shared, manipulated and even sold. This article by  Collen shows us a few examples of how everything we do online is taking a different path.  It also explains the interrelation between the economic system and the government, how Many platforms that we use on our everyday life are disclosing and sharing what we search or post on the web. For example when the dad was upset because he received coupons for baby’s clothes, diapers, accessories but it was because the daughter was pregnant and  searched for baby’s bottles. This is an example of how the privacy of that individual was violated. What if she didn’t want the dad to know about her pregnancy yet?. Oh well, the companies need to sell and they don’t care about that.

This takes us to the point that, the more power you have , the more access you get. If you work for the FBI or any surveillance agency, is not so difficult to get any kind of information for any purpose. But if you are a regular civilian, you don’t have that privilege. But then the information gathered by these surveillance agencies is not benefiting us, in fact it is negatively impacting our well-being and limiting our freedom.

The facts:

1. How the FBI or surveillance agencies can retrieve information from a data base even when you have deleted everything. Any information we delete, will be invisible to us but never gone to these agencies.
2. How the government can red-flag anything you search for example the writer that looked up ” how to kill my wife” and “decapitated”.
3. The twit from the guy that talked about destroying America and he was actually detained in the airport for hours to be interrogated.

Here is an excellent article by Aaron Couch about rules that we need to follow when sharing information.

1. If you had the power, what constitutional law would you create to protect civilians rights?
2. As a civilian, Do you know what actions can you take towards the information that is being shared and sold to other agencies?

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This documentary is informative on how corporate companies and government work together to surveil on people. Today corporate giants such as Facebook and Google have become the ruler of todays society. Social network for us today have become a Need and privacy is just the sacrifice we must pay. For example Andrejevic in his article brings up the example of googles free wifi and how using it was generally free but technically you were offering valuable information about yourself to third party companies (Andrejevic 1). Government agencies relation with these companies have become friendly, where they help each other. As stated in the film, government agencies requests information on thousands of people from Facebook. For example Paul Edwards conclusion in his article states that computers were build and funded by the military (Edwards 73), and now the evolution of technology has shifted the interest to surveillance.

Throughout the documentary I was shocked by some facts that I was not aware of before. First the fact that TOM TOM has been sharing speeding info on its navigation system users in the Netherlands to local authorities to issue tickets. Secondly it was surprising to find out the amount of surveillance companies in existence who sell their technologies to government agencies to help with surveillance. Lastly the story of an innocent child who posted his concerns for the president but keywords from his sharing on social media had raised flag on the CIA system. All three of these are dependable strictly data collected by programmed system, which doesn’t always judge correctly and can raise serious concerns.

Here in this Article it explains how surveillance is conducted and who buys majority of the information.

To conclude, after watching the documentary, “Terms and Conditions May Apply“, I see the importance of reading what you are agreeing to but still I will overlook and skip straight down to “Accept” when I sign up for something. This is because in reality this is my only option. In todays society time is valuable and not using a common platform used by the masses can put you behind in what is relevant today and the future.

1. Do you think whistle blowers have helped raise public’s awareness towards privacy in the recent years?
2. Do you see a future where privacy can be restored or do you think it’s too late for a change?

Does your information privacy matter?

Through out the last decades, many social media platforms have grown in a tremendous exponential rate. Best explanaiton for such growth is the use of algorithms that manipulates and stores all of the information provided by the users for a profit. The documentary mirrors various points, we had previously learned in class. Such as digital enclosure, contextual advertising and interactivity.

Siva Vaidhyananthan, author of “The Googlization of everything” expresses  the idea of digital enclosure. He states that although it seems like” Google is free , which is part of the reason why we like the company, google is not really free- at least not free in a liberty sense”. I can relate this statment to digital enclosure, since it’s the concept of  an interactive platform in which every transaction and move of the user is being recorded. Which then leads to two separate groups; the private organizations controlling the information of the users, and the  users of such platforms. Unfortunatemely this information is not just being used for marketing purposes, our government is also paying search engines, and social media platform for our virtual transactions.

The relation between the economic systems and the system of government control is such of companies like Facebook, Google or instram which purposely make their privacy policy not user friendly to then collect data from users and sell it forward to the government. Because of this the distribution of power is uneven. It connects back to what we learned in class about interactivity. Interactivity is no longer a symmetrical two way street, insted it is an asymmetrical loss of privacy. Users are becoming more and more transparent, not voluntarily but by default. While all the surveillance agencies remain hidden and secretive.

The users well being and freedom are being affected by the asymmetrical interactivity as it is evident in the next three examples from the documentary.

1. One of the stories that really shocked me was the story of the Law student from Europe. Part of the reason why I found it so interesting is that the story first begins stating how the government of Austria, requires company to be transparent unlike the USA. Because of this the law student was able to request information about all of his virtual transactions from Facebook. Although he had been using Facebook infrequently for only three years, much information was inspired from him to determine many things, such as places he had visit through that period of times, what political party he supports, he was able to find comments and conversations he had made, even more surprisingly he realized that when one of the users delete Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it is deleted, is never gone, the user just never sees it. Although this did not affect his physical well being, I’m sure he felt his freedom was being oppressed. After realizing someone is always watching.
2. Another scene that i found really interesting was the scene of Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ, according to the documentary, is a piece of software that every smartphone possessed. This software capture every single key stroke. Then the documentary shows a debate in congress where the head of the FBI admits that although information collected for criminal cases was not directly obtained from Carrier IQ, some of the information coming from wireless carrier might come from Carrier IQ. This shows us how developed the world of surveillance is, you no longer have to be involve in social media platforms , or even used search engines to be virtually tracked.
3. The story of Joe Leopardi was really shocking to me. Joe had made a post on Facebook quoting a movie scene he was currently watching, the quote display some terms of mass destruction weapons. The same day of the status being posted, the police showed up at his house, without a warrant or anything searched through his property. Not only was his freedom violated but that situation could have also affected his physical well being.

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Who really read the terms and conditions, I know I don’t. Companies like Facebook and Instagram purposely make them long because they know the average person is not going to sit and read hundreds of pages of boring material, instead we go straight to “Accept” or “Agree”. Thus making us ignorant to what we agreed to and unaware of how our data is being handled.

The relation between the economic systems and the system of government control that we see in the documentary is that the companies we shop at are collecting and storing our day to day transactions and selling it to the government, who then goes and use it against us if we are perceived as a “threat”, in the name of national security of course.

Power is distributed unevenly in this society, the people who can afford to pay for highly sensitive data or information are those who have the most power. The affect of this uneven distribution has a negative impact on individual well being and their sense of freedom. Knowing one’s personal data is for sale is very upsetting, we put our trust in those companies and expect them to be ethical about our data and not sell it to the highest bidder.

The three stories that shocked me from the documentary was :

1. Instagram being able to use your pictures and videos and sell them but don’t compensate you in return.
2. Tom-Tom the navigation services company, was helping the police in Netherlands to set up speed traps by selling them consumer information.
3. A writer who was doing online research to develop stories for a show was red flagged for being a potential murderer based on his search history.

(A very interesting article titled ” 13 Ways Policy And Politics Stole Your Privacy In 2016” goes into a detail about companies violating consumers privacy.)

1) Are you going start reading the fine prints for new or existing accounts?

2) Will you take more consideration in what you say online knowing that the government is watching?

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“I’m okay with Facebook behaving like a company, but I think we need to treat it like a company and not treat it like some benign public utility.”

(Sherry Turkle, Terms and Conditions May Apply, 16:51-17:00)

Watch the documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply.”

1. What is the relation between the economic systems and the system of government control that we see in the documentary? How is power distributed within this society? What are the implications of that distribution on issues affecting the people’s well-being and freedom?
2. What are the three (3) facts, stories, or scenes from the documentary that are surprising/shocking to you? What do they reveal?
3. Your blogpost is due on Thursday April 20. Please label your post under “digital economies.”

Hope you’re enjoying your spring break! 🙂