Terms and Conditions

Quick Response #2

This morning, when I checked CNN news there was a pop-up window that said “By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.” I, of course, would never have taken note of this except that right before I had read Oliver Smith’s “Facebook’s Terms and Conditions.” I clicked on the “terms and conditions” link and it may have well been in a different language. I had the intention of reading the terms and coming out with some sort of epiphany about how my privacy was being violated but what I found instead was a very unreadable document. They could have said that they were taking my credit card number and using it for their daily Starbucks, thrown a few large words in there, and I probably would not have noticed. It was that cryptic.

I am not usually the type of person who gets wrapped up and stressed about my privacy. For the most part my mentality is that I am not doing anything interesting or even worth investigating or posting inappropriate photos on my Facebook profile, so I am not particularly concerned about my privacy. The more I learn however, the more freaked out I become. I’m not really comfortable with the idea that data is being collected about my spending habits, my family, hometown, college, it seems endless. Scarier still is the fact that there is nothing I can really do about it. I can only hope that in the somewhat near future people or institutions will find a way to protect themselves. In the meantime, though, I’m not going to stop using social media and the internet, my whole life revolves around it. I am so deeply entangled in the online world that it seems like there is no going back. So for the time being it seems like I am at the mercy of the coding geniuses out there. And that scares me.