I found the film, Terms and Conditions May Apply, fascinating. First and foremost, I was completely creeped out and felt violated by the governments sneaky infringement on mine/our privacy. It makes me very uncomfortable that my private information can fully be accessed from third parties, and that this fact is not made clear through browsers such as google, and only writen in very fine print. After watching this film, reading the assigned articles, and our class discussions, my head hurts thinking about this issue and possible solutions.
That being said, at the beginning of the film they stated a statistic that if you were to read all the fine print in the agreements to use different websites the amount of time doing so would add up to a month. That resonated with me, because I do not have the time or patience to do that, as I'm sure most people feel. Also, to play devils advocate, it is clear that the film wanted to portray a one-sided extremely negative view on the governments tracking of our personal data. The film used cases where a television writer, a middle school boy, and twitter users, were tracked and interrogated by the police and government. These examples were hilarious as it was so obvious that these people were not potential terrorists, and showed the stupidity and downside of tracking, as it takes users words out of context. It would be interesting if the film mentioned how many cases of potential terrorists they did manage to catch before anything happened. I can't help but think of the particularly horrible two years we have had in terms of crime including the Aurora, Colorado movie shooting, the Newtown school shooting, and more recently the Boston bombing. This is where I lose support for my devils advocate approach. If the reasoning behind tracking is to prevent these monstrosities from occurring, why weren't the people behind these horrible events caught before the events happened? I am not sure what can be done to help this issue.
As a compromise, it should be made much more clear if users information is going to be sold or seen by third party sites, and their identities should be anonymous. However, I don't think this partial solution gets to the root of the main issue, that people are far to eager to share personal information, which the Facebook article goes into. As someone who barely uses social media, I am constantly in shock at the self incriminating, stupid thigs people share. There have been far too many stories of people insulting their boss on Facebook, or publicly playing hooky from work. What is it going to take for people to learn how to use social media appropriately? It may sound like an odd suggestion, but as we approach a new age of over sharing online, perhaps kids should learn in school, in addition to from their parents, how to appropriately use social media, and the Internet in general.