Every time you use a service online, you are generally going to have to create an account. Creating an account on a website, at the very least, requires you to provide your name, e-mail address, and birth date. Often times, these sites will also prompt you for your phone number, your mailing address, and, if you are shopping, your credit card and billing information. These are some of the most intimate details of our lives—if this information were to fall into the wrong hands, our bank accounts could be wiped clean and we could become unsafe in our homes.
In the movie, a software called CarrierIQ was discussed. This is a program that is “apparently” installed in most mobile phones which records “every keystroke ever made on the device.” This type of software is especially insidious. Every photo ever captured, every message ever typed out, could become known. This could include medical information, bank account information, and personal information (such as “I cheated on my wife”) that could be very compromising if it were to be controlled by parties that wanted to cause us harm. In the film, the argument “if you don’t want people to know about it, don’t do it” was brought up. I assert that there is no human being that has a computer or mobile device that is 100% free from non-incriminating or non-embarrassing or non-socially devastating information.
All of this data is owned by “Big Data,” which is an incredibly vague term that I’m still not quite sure I understand. These are third party companies which analyze and dissect our data which is sold from mega-companies like Google and Facebook. While some of these purposes aren’t so bad, i.e. customizing advertisement information on the sidebar of our Facebook profiles, some of it is not so benevolent, i.e. when the NSA’s technology is tapped into our private messages searching for terrorist threats. Though they claim that this is in the interest of national security, the practice of protecting our borders is less convincing (i.e. the 7th grader who was pulled out of class and questioned by the secret service).
I think that the most unsettling aspect of all of this is that most Internet and social media users are apathetic to this infringement of privacy. According to the boyd and Hargittai reading, most teens didn’t really pay all that much attention to Facebook’s changing privacy settings. When they’re settings were defaulted to sharing with “everyone,” many posts that were intended for a small audience became available to everyone in the whole world. Later, though many news sources and scholars pointed out this shady behavior, it seemed as though social media-using teens of the world released a collective, “eh, whatever.”
Overall, the most striking moment for me of Terms and Conditions May Apply was the moment when one guy (excuse me for forgetting his name and position, I believe his title was “chief hacker and CEO” but I can’t remember which company) answered the question “is privacy dead?” without skipping a beat “absolutely. Yes. It’s dead.”