Who really reads the Terms of Service anyway?
Are EULAs and TOSs intentionally designed as multi-page, single-spaced, 4 font, legalized writing to confuse users or simply to dissuade users from reading past the first paragraph?
A few highlights from Instagram
Translated: All your content is ours. We do with it as we wish.
Opinion: You create it, Instagram/Facebook will make money off of it with no compensation to you. This is the model of how “free stuff on the Internet” works.
Translated: We have access to your camera, I mean “Instagram’s” camera.
Opinion: They haz your phone camera.
Translated: Instagram keeps track of everything that you do on their platform, including the use of their camera.
Opinion: Sure. I get it. But this would be like a car rental company keeping track of every place you drove the car that you rented. Car rental companies probably do that too…
Translated: Instagram collects data about you even when you don’t provide it.
Opinion: Do they mean private messages too? Sure. Why not.
Translated: We gonna map out your network.
Opinion: Yikes!
Translated: Everything. We take everything.
Opinion: For the love of all that is good and holy! This looks like a digital forensics examination (and I mean “digital exam” as a “digital prostate exam”.
Translated: In case you didn’t get it earlier, we take everything, even that which is not on our platform.
Opinion: Instagram/Facebook is a third-party data collector that takes your data from another third-party data collector which probably takes your data from another third-party data collector. All to be curated ultimately by Facebook/Instagram. You don’t even need to have a Facebook account!
Translated: We know what is best for you. This might because we know everything about you or because we want you to behave a certain way and believe in what we want you to believe in.
Opinion: When you want to see a movie, you might want to ask a friend or read reviews, but you don’t have to. You can simply choose to see or not see a movie. Facebook/Instagram requires that you agree to be pushed toward groups that they want you to join. Kinda like getting jumped into a gang that you didn’t think you wanted to do, but got pushed into it by the local gang bangers.
Translated: We know everywhere you been, exactly where you are now, and can accurately predict where you will be going next.
Opinion: This is life on IoT and our addiction to “smart” devices. And we must agree to it in order to use ‘free’ services.
Translated: Ha! We haz your biometric data too!
Opinion: Facial recognition is one of the security features that we have to give up, but is something that we can’t change like a password.
Translated: Not only do we see what you search for, but we keep that, just in case…
Opinion: Forensic peeps know this. Anything you type online is there for everyone to see, even those you don’t want to see it, potentially forever.
Translated: We not only take, curate, analyze, and store your information indefinitely, but we will share it around the world to our “partners”.
Opinion: Who are the “partners” and WHY DO THIS?!?
Summary
Free is not free.
Social media platforms are like leopards stalking dinner. You don’t see the leopard. You don’t think anything about it. And you don’t care that tidbits of your Internet activity are being analyzed by humans, ML, and AI. By the time you realize how much private data is gone, it is too late to much about it. Presumably, this is all for a profit motive, in which you make none. Worst case scenario is a nation-state obtaining this immense data. But that would never happen..
update: This from Twitter, best visual of EULAs that I have ever seen.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr"><a href="https://t.co/uYXup8iEdE">https://t.co/uYXup8iEdE</a></p>— #StopTheStupid! Goat (@bill_e_ghote) <a href="https://twitter.com/bill_e_ghote/status/1342971321274277894?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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