Did
anyone check the fine print when they voted for Obama? Those of us who did not click “I agree” are
wondering if it said “will freely rummage through your e-mail and track your
every digital move.” Cullen Hoback occasionally
expresses a bit of (presumed) voter’s remorse when surveying the state of
internet privacy in Terms and Conditions
May Apply (trailer
here), which
opens this Friday in New York.
They
talk a progressive game, but Google and Facebook clearly emerge as the dastardly
villains of Hoback’s documentary. It is
not just that they collect and disseminate users’ data. They changed the rules in the middle of the
game. For new sign-ups, it might be
spelled out in black-and-white, but in small all-cap sans-serif type. Users are not supposed to read those unwieldy
terms and conditions and they don’t.
TACMA spreads its
outrage far and wide at the expense of the core issues under discussion—the fine
print. The question what users are
agreeing to would be pertinent even if the NSA never existed. As a case in point I have heard of but never
verified, musicians reportedly using a European website to host their scores as
means promoting their music reportedly signed away their publishing rights in
the process. Aside from privacy
concerns, just what sort of intellectual property implications do those terms
and conditions secretly hold? Frustratingly, TACMA never delves into such territory.
Understandably,
Hoback is rather disturbed that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are so willing to
funnel information to the government.
However, his tone-deafness is rather laughable when he calls on
Anonymous hacker-spokesman Barrett Brown to bemoan the death of privacy. Of course, Pres. George W. Bush is frequently
invoked as a bogeyman, but Hoback reluctantly admits things are the same or
perhaps worse under Obama. Indeed, he
rightly points out the current administration has criminally prosecuted more
government whistleblowers than all its predecessors combined.
