source: ClassicFM
It is without a doubt that we just carelessly skip to the “I agree” button without really knowing what we agree to. It is in our heads that since others use this website, or it seems to have a respectable reputation in society, it wouldn’t cause us significant harm to not read the terms and conditions.
That isn’t the best proposal to settle for, because the documentary, “Terms and Conditions May Apply” says otherwise. The relationship between economic systems and system of government control portrayed in the film says that government agencies are constantly contacting large companies such as Google and Facebook every year for data on specific groups/individuals. It is also stated that many companies such as AOL has a permanent storage system, and although the user may delete something from the public, it is still accessible somewhere in their database through company administrators and government agencies upon request.
source: J_O_I_D
These implications affect people’s well-being and freedom because we are capable of being tracked and having our privacy infringed. For example, in the documentary, AOL once leaked search histories for different individuals, and one specific individual searched “how to kill your wife”, and “decapitated photos” multiple times and many articles soon showed up saying that a user was planning to commit a murder. After tracking down that person, it was actually just a writer that was trying to get some inspiration to write a story. That user was wrongfully accused of committing premeditated murder, and although if he actually was trying to commit premeditated murder, it is still wrong to infringe someone’s privacy like that.
A scene that shocked me was when the government executed a huge wiretapping spying program in the U.S. in 2002 in an attempt to prevent illegal activities and/or future attacks (in response to 9/11.) There was nothing the public could do except be outraged because the wiretapping program collected all their data and was being distributed among select government agencies. Another scene that shocked me was the default settings for Facebook. Zuckerberg says that the default setting for posts on Facebook is public because it is supposed to be shared with the community, but I believe that shouldn’t be the case because not everyone is computer-literate and can understand how to use social media. The default setting should be “for friends” because for the older generation and less tech-savvy users, they wouldn’t understand how to change privacy settings and they would be sharing personal posts with everyone in the world even though they think they are only sharing with their Facebook friends. Another scene that shocked me was Google’s original privacy policy in 2000 saying that “Google will not reveal a user’s identity” but then in 2001, when they updated their privacy policy, it claims that “Google will not disclose its cookies to third parties except by a required legal process such as a search warrant, court order, subpoena, or statute.” Google then claims that the 2001 privacy policy is their original, disregarding the 2000 privacy policy. This is shocking to me because Google doesn’t want the public to know that it once supported anonymity despite government intervention. Now that the government has the right to access Google’s database, Google supports a new system of data collection that has helped shaped today’s surveillance and data storage.
- What do you think of the default settings for Facebook being “public” instead of “friends only”?
- Do you honestly think you will start to read company’s “terms and conditions” even though you have watched the documentary and realized the potential danger of putting your personal data to the world wide web?