Raise your hand if you have ever scrolled past words in an online Terms of Service to check “I Agree” as quickly as possible. Yep, I thought I wasn’t the only one. I think we would all want to think of ourselves as “technologically savvy,” but by definition to be “savvy” is “having or showing perception, comprehension, or shrewdness especially in practical matters.” It seems to me shrewdness is not exactly synonymous with blind acceptance.
In case you hadn’t noticed, TOS agreements are long. And intimidating. As I began researching this conundrum, the first article I came across was “Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days,” published in an online version of The Atlantic. The article summarized the research done by a PhD candidate and an associate professor from Carnegie Mellon University, McDonald and Cranor, in their study “The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies.” With the assumption that readers get through 250 words/minute, they calculated the average word count from 75 of the most popular websites, and found the average reading time to be between 8-12 minutes. However, these numbers don’t reflect the time that would be required to fully comprehend the meaning of the legalese that fills most TOS agreements. We all know the feeling of reading through a paragraph and realizing you don’t remember anything that you just read, and that doesn’t get us anywhere closer to being TOS savvy.
We constantly make decisions based on what we could gain against how much it would cost us. The decision to read a Terms of Service, like anything else, is caught in a seesaw-like tension between the gain of being informed and the cost of our time.
Unfortunately, getting companies to shorten or take out “legalese” doesn’t sound feasible to me. The legal system is set the way it is, and I’m sure lawyers spend lots of time intentionally writing agreements to rigorously cover the company’s butt from all sides. So, going back to our savvy/spare time see-saw, it seems to me that the best plan is to increase the perceived value of being savvy, i.e. convince myself (and you) that being more knowledgeable is worth the extra investment of time.
My views on TOS agreements were first challenged when I was in the class I am currently taking, Writing in the Digital World. We read a study published by researchers who manipulated people’s newsfeeds in order to track the effect (mood) of those individual’s posting behavior. I was struck by how people reacted to the study feeling frustrated and violated, and yet they “technically” already agreed that Facebook could use them to conduct research. So while I’m usually reluctant to jump on board scare tactics and conspiracy theories, this study was a good prompt to get me thinking; and perhaps imagining hypothetical extremes made me question what I might be taking for granted. Taking just Facebook for example, most users think of their audience as their friends, and (most) know they adjust this field in privacy settings. There is a silent, secondary audience however, and that is the staff and associates of Facebook. Add third parties and now it really seems dicey and opaque to have a grasp of where your content goes.
One thing we can do to speed up the process is prime ourselves in advance about what we’re actually looking for. The second source I found in my research process is a website called Terms of Service; Didn’t Read that evaluates different website’s TOS agreements and rates them from A-D based on fairness. I wish I could say this website was a panacea, but many of the websites are not yet rated. Plus, if we’re trying to get away from blind dependence, making decisions from our own research seems best. Nevertheless, this website helped put into plain English what TOS may include and, here are the main categories I found in the picture below. I wanted to include them all just in case something jumps out as more pertinent to you than it was to me.
I thought it would be a good next step to practice what I’ve preached, and read through at least Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR). I timed myself as a fun follow-up to the first research study, and found that it took me 15 minutes to read their basic policy. However, that policy linked to other important policies, such as the Data Policy that took me an additional 5 minutes to read. I didn’t even get to the Cookie policy, which will have to be another layer for another day. For today, I’m just going to address the categories (as defined by Terms of Service; Didn’t Read) that stood out to me the most, Notice of Changing Terms, Ownership, and Personal Data.
The first thing I looked at was the category Notice of Changing Terms. It was alarming to me to read on Terms of Service; Didn’t Read that some websites and services can change their terms at any time without notice. Continuing to use these services after changes constitutes “acceptance,” but in order to discover those changes in the first place you would have to police their terms periodically for yourself to make sure they haven’t changed. I was relieved to see that Facebook does promise to notify of changes, for both their SRR and Data Policy.
As someone who works in the creative field, the Ownership category is pertinent for any audio/visual work I may share on a service. I was glad to read “You own all of the content you post on Facebook,” but didn’t love the classic string of legalese that said I am granting a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-liscensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.” I think the jist of what they’re saying is that I’m giving them the right to use my content, I ultimately still own it, I’m not going to charge Facebook any money for it, and I can license it to someone else at the same time if I want.
As for Personal Data, I think everyone is comfortable to different degrees. I previously had the mindset of “Why would anyone care about the inane details of my life” until I realized that many of these services can use your data for academic research, and that is a much broader audience than I initially imagined. Data in this context can mean anything, including messages that I’ve sent across Facebook’s platform. While there still isn’t any content that would jeopardize my reputation etc, it is unsettling to me to think that any number of grad students or employees, could use my information unbeknownst to me. The scope of their research can span from technical/security maintenance to the societal impact of technology. Within universities, faculty and students are subject to very strict standards for conducting research that are not necessarily present in commercial research like that Facebook conducts. For example, “As the cornerstone of human subjects protections, informed consent means that participants are voluntarily participating in the research with adequate knowledge of relevant risks and benefits. Providing informed consent typically includes the researcher explaining the purpose of the research, the methods being used, the possible outcomes of the research, as well as associated risks or harms that the participants might face.” While, I agree to “research” in Facebook’s SRR, I’m certainly kept in the dark about any of the details of what study in which I may be unwittingly participating. This quote was taken from an article published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy called “Internet Research Ethics,” and it goes into much more depth about this topic than time allows for here.
This post alone has a good amount of information, so let’s recap. The bad news that probably won’t go anywhere is that TOS agreements are messy, time-consuming documents to read and comprehend. The good news is that, while I know there is much more to research, I already feel more knowledgeable with the time I invested researching Facebook’s SRR. So unless I’m comfortable with my data being used in any possible fashion, I can’t make assumptions for how it is being used. Despite the expense of time, I think it is worthwhile to take responsibility for my own word and feel good about checking “I Agree.”
Sources
Buchanan, Elizabeth A., Zimmer, Michael. “Internet Research
Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. 2012. www.plato.standord.edu/entries/ethics-internet-reserch/#InfCon
Kramera, Hillory, Hancock. “Experimental Evidence of
massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America. 2014.
Mcdonald,
A.M. and Cranor, O.F. “The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies.” I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the
Information Society 4 (2008), 543–565.
Madrigal,
Alex C. “Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76
Work Days” The Atlantic. March 1,
2012.
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