Student 9

Homework Reflection

For this week’s assignment, I choose to watch the documentary Terms and Conditions

May Apply. This documentary focuses on what happens, and what it really means, when you

agree to the terms and conditions, as well as security policies, on many digital platforms. It

talked about how no one really reads these terms even though everyone, I included, just click that

they have read and agree them. It would take about a month of work time to read all of these

conditions each year, which is time that no one has, or wants, to give up.

It was revealed that in these terms and conditions, there are many things that give the

companies access to things that, otherwise, would be considered privacy violations. I learned

how in Apple’s terms and conditions, it mentions wiretapping, which is something that no one

wants a huge company like Apple to do. It also showed that by signing AT&T’s terms, you are

giving them permission to investigate, prevent or act against any illegal activities they may

suspect you are involved in. You flat out agree to them using your personal data, as there is a

phrase in the document that explicitly says you agree to doing so.

Before the late 90’s companies did not even try to tell their customers what they were

doing with the data they had collected on them. In 2000, however, when a company went under

water, they decided to sell their customers information, including names, addresses and billing

information to other businesses to make a profit and keep them afloat. After this happened,

people started demanding internet privacy laws to prevent this from occurring again, and in

2001, there were a dozen bills created to do so. After 9/11, all these bills were left behind, and
the Patriot Act was put into effect, which allowed the government to surveil US citizens in a lot

of different ways which were not legal previously.

There are also services that screen what is posted online but does not take any other

factors into account other than what is written. We learned about a young boy who posted

something commenting on how Bin Laden had been killed and President Obama should be

careful that people may be coming to hurt him. This child was taken into custody and questioned

by the Secret Service since the screening service found this post as a threat. The child simply

wanted to warn the President, and had no intent on harming him, but was still flagged. This

service did not investigate anything other than what he wrote, and simply doing so is an invasion

of privacy that Twitter allowed to happen given the terms and conditions he agreed to.

Some people believe that these privacy acts were not actually about giving people

privacy, but actually limiting it. After looking at Google’s privacy policy in both 2000 and 2001,

there were major differences between the two even though they were made published just twelve

months apart. The first tells users that their information is completely private no matter what, and

the second says that given certain circumstances, they can give out your information. If this

information is not concerning enough, we were also told about how Google fails to recognize the

first privacy policy made in 2000. The documentary found this policy with the help of an

archiving service who has a screen shot of the policy form the year 2000, but if you look at the

policy from the year 2000 on Google’s website, it is actually the one that the archive has from

2001.

This part of the documentary really baffled me. Google is such a huge company, and

something that is used everyday in my life, and I was surprised to see that they are ‘hiding’ their

first privacy policy. It made me think that if they are hiding this, something from 19 years ago,
what else may the be hiding from us? Not only what is Google hiding form us, but also the other

companies and business that have big presences in our lives. How much of our lives do

companies and programs we interact with every day have access to?

Overall this documentary was very enlightening. There were so many things that I never

even thought would be in the terms we always blindly agree to, but they are. We have given

companies access to so many private aspects of our lives and let them do way too much with the

information they obtain on us. Even though this is so far from ideal, it would take so much for all

these companies to be forced to keep our information private because of how deep everything is

hidden in the terms we agree to every day.