The most important advice from the documentary is that the quickest moments of overlooking something becomes our longest moments of ignorance. But we do it now because we simply cannot avoid it.
Once we realize how risky it is to put our information out there, we finally would “skim” the privacy policies and terms & conditions. At least I do. But now there’s a condition that we do not agree to. If we don’t like it, we don’t register or sign up for whatever it is we are supposed to agree to. So in the end we are forced to make a sacrifice that benefits the company first.
Power in the end comes from the people who are lobbying the government at their doorsteps (Terms and Conditions May Apply, 21:00-21:19). Unfortunately these lobbyists are companies and their representatives: high and mighty, rich and powerful. A normal voice doesn’t stand a chance. That is how the system works. Money influences power, power influences the people, and more inbetween causing a big interconnected web. An ideology comes into place, telling us that this invasion of privacy is not meant to frighten you until it should. Also that your privacy is secure until it is questioned. Like from chapter 9 of Digital Media and Society “Not all political ideologies are economic in their logic, but many of the most important ideologies of the modern world (capitalism, communism, socialism) are explicitly economic in form. (Athique, p.127)”
The fact that Facebook, the site I use every single day, can betray someone with sneakily changing the privacy policy overtime frightens me yet makes me indifferent. That in itself is to be feared.
The idea that companies can create ways to make people skim over the terms and conditions, and privacy policies, like using all capitalized font with a small sized print, shocks me yet makes me feel like “I’m not surprised.” That is something to consider, on how our ideologies make us react to these things.
The idea that hitting the delete button only deletes it from yourself, but a government or company can still go back to retrieve what you delete is secretive and deceiving, but I don’t doubt that it happens nor do I doubt that it will continue happening. That makes me feel like we shouldn’t touch technology anymore. Nor should we use our credit cards,
Also as a bonus, Barack Obama is a prime example of the ideology that we sort of “brush off” these privacy issues. The documentary mentions how he doesn’t stop wiretapping programs from occurring nor did he stop them during his presidency. Politifact wrote a piece on this issue and I quote “We don’t expect the president to give the American people every detail about a classified surveillance program. But we do expect him to place such a program within the rule of law…” But now that he’s out of office, I don’t expect anything good coming from our new president.
So a few things to consider:
- Why are we offended when people/companies sell our information to third parties? When they would do it under our noses anyways.
- Why isn’t anything changing now that we know the government and companies can betray us at anytime?