Social Media is Big Business: Week 4 Response
The part of this week’s reading that struck me the hardest was Oliver Smith’s “Facebook terms and conditions” article. While I, like any millennial, have been told the dangers of sharing certain information online and have learned the art of curating a social media feed that is personal but not too revealing, the scope of the potential hazards did not click for me until reading this piece. For example, Facebook has license over your content even after deactivation or deletion of your account! The fact that these Terms & Conditions are written in almost incomprehensible legalese makes these companies’ dubious rights to our data even harder to digest. How can it be fair to hide such extreme clauses of pseudo-ownership past, in Facebook’s example, more than 14,000 words covering the terms of service, data use and cookie use policy alone?
This leads me to further question what it is about social media and internet culture that has pushed us to just accept these breaches of our privacy and property? Why is it common knowledge that most people don’t read or pay attention to the Terms & Conditions of these services, simply expecting to be taken advantage of? This turned up in Ethan Zuckerman’s “The Internet’s Original Sin” as well. He points to our willingness to accept online surveillance from government and big businesses, explaining his theory that “we’ve been taught that this is simply how the Internet works.” I’m surprised to find that, when I think about it, he is correct. Our generation is one that knows the extent to which it is being exploited, and we think that we are smarter than “the man” and that somehow this knowledge keeps us aware, protected, and safe from any extreme harm. The problem therein is the not-extreme harm, the day-to-day invasions that we have come to completely ignore. Zukerman theorizes that we have resigned ourselves to giving up certain privacies in order to continue to use the same resources at no cost, and he’s probably right. The question is: is that sacrifice worth the price?
