By Using Your Site I Agree to NOTHING
My computer, my rules
There’s a disturbing trend I’m seeing among websites today, but before I get into that, let me describe the situation as if it happened in real life.
You’re walking down the street past some shops, perhaps an outdoor mall like we have around Phoenix. You’re not really looking for anything in particular, just browsing the shops and looking through their windows. You happen upon one shop with an interesting widget in the window and, pausing, you examine it more closely.
Suddenly, someone bursts from the shop and grabs you. They reach in your pocket and pull out your ID card. They make a quick note of it, verify your address to be correct, and explain that — because you stopped to look through the window — you’ve agreed to be tracked while in front of the store and possibly beyond if they find you an interesting sort who could be a potential customer. They force you to take a coupon that you don’t want, and then they go back inside where they watch you closely through the window as you wonder what in the hell just happened.
That’s what’s going on with far too many websites today. I’m sure you’ve seen it too, a little box that pops up somewhere on the site that says something like “By using this website you agree to our use of cookies and their placement upon your computer in accordance with our cookie policy. You agree to be bound by the terms of our visitor agreement…” and so on. Some of these things contain perfectly legitimate information and have some legal basis in that they are telling you what their cookies are going to do and even how you can disable them. Yet there are plenty of them who posture that you’re breaking their terms of service if you block cookies, or worse, employ an ad-blocker.
A website’s right to present bits and information ends at my computer.
There’s an old saying that goes “the right to swing your fist ends at my nose.” Moving that into the digital age, a website’s right to present bits and information ends at my computer. My computer, and yours, is not an extension of any website. Once the bits land on your system, you have the right to say no to anything. How you do that is up to you and the mechanisms you employ. For me, my browser of choice is Firefox. So I use Adblock Plus along with Privacy Badger from the EFF to lock out all of the things I don’t care to handle. There are other solutions out there and you can get very involved with controlling how websites interact with your computer.
Besides, there’s one way around all of this that none of those “visitor agreements” seem to address: private browser or incognito mode. All modern browsers support some kind of privacy mode where nothing is saved or retained, not even the browsing history. I know more than a few people who browse like this as a default. So the private browser visits the site, supposedly agrees to their uses of cookies, and then the user closes out and nothing is retained.
Going one step beyond, what happens if I choose to block cookies? Can they sue me? Can they stop delivering content, services, and products to me? Will the site no longer come up if their software detects a cookie blocking agent? The answers, in order, are no, no, and no. Of course there’s no legal basis for this behaviour because, first, they’d have to be able to prove someone was behind the keyboard. I could fire up a quick script that goes to a given website at a random point during the day on a computer I don’t use. No one is at the keyboard, so no one can agree to the policy. The other two methods are easily defeated via private browsing. When you’re incognito, every time you visit the site is the first time you’ve visited the site.
And you know what? I still use those websites. I’m not bound by their terms of service and neither are you. They have painted their screed on the wall of the Web and it’s there for everyone to see and access. How you access it isn’t for them to say because they accepted the terms of use of the Web when they put it online in the first place. You can post your message high and proud but, once it’s out there, that message isn’t yours anymore.
And that includes this one.
