I had a political science professor who used to say, about the separation of public and private life, “your privacy ends at my nose.” I love you, Dr. K, and I miss you, but I think now you’ll need to modify slightly: “your privacy ends at whatever point you connect a device to my network.”
The news broke this week that Apple has tracking info in ye olde iDevices.
I have to say, honestly, I am not at all surprised. In fact as a skeptic of cellular phones in general (and a very, very late adopter), one of the things I often said to people is that I don’t want to be available ALL the time (I used to love being in the car, out in the middle of nowhere between here and there, “unavailable,” but alas we must eventually rank responsibility to family, friends and work over our driving freedom, though I do still blast 90s music and go a little too fast. I’m human!). I also didn’t like the idea of a big brother-ish system knowing exactly where I was. It only makes sense that if you have something with a geo-location function, someone somewhere would like to have your geolocation data for some sort of geolocation study. Maybe it’s as innocent as finding holes in coverage. Who knows?
But we had to know that this sort of thing was happening.
What I really want to talk about here, though, is something I used to have to talk to people about all the time. I used to work as the volunteer moderator for the message board of a major athletic team which shall remain nameless. My job was– contrary to my own personal stance on how online communities should behave– to police posters based on a very specific, very rigid set of rules. And this often meant banning people for a week, for a month, forever due to their activities.
And I got used to typing this one sentence.
“Did you read the Terms of Service, or did you just click yes to agree?”
The users thought, as Americans, they had freedom of speech. But they didn’t on that forum. They were using a service provided by an owner, and if they didn’t follow the rules they had no recourse but to, as my superior once said “suck it up.”
Very few of them knew that.
People don’t read TOS documents. I have found this over and over with my gaming research. The people I talk to don’t realize what they do and don’t own, what they can and can’t do. This is a problem. But I think it’s a problem with big, nasty teeth that professional writers need to think about.
The first problem is that TOS documents are basically composed with the idea of beating the user into submission with legal jargon. The iTunes store one is approximately six billion pages* long. The one for World of Warcraft refers to no less than five external documents. it’s not kind of user friendly. It’s user abusive. Anyone who denies that is just playing a cruel trick on themselves. Very few people are going to read all of that.
So the first problem is that due to length and language people won’t read a ToS. That’s bad.
But the second problem is that we, as professional writers, need to figure out how to write one that makes it clear what people need to know without it being “pursuant to the party of the third part, herein forward referred to as the provider, allows you, herein referred to as the overwhelmed reader, access to our service to do a limited number of things that we will elaborate upon over the next twenty pages…”
I conduct a unit in my FYC classes where I ask my students who owns their Facebook profiles and the stuff they post. They think they do (aww, isn’t that sweet? I could hug each of them!) When I make them look at the ToS for Facebook, many of them say “oh, well, I don’t care. I like Facebook,” maybe one a year says “oh yeah, I knew that” and the rest freak out. “They own my photos now? WHAT?”
we need to make the ToS a user friendly document so that research like what came out this week isn’t a shock to people. I didn’t read that much of my iPhone ToS (I knew I needed the phone, so what was I going to do? Say no?), but I am pretty sure that it says in the ToS “we will totally keep track of where you are for our own purposes.” We knew this before we discovered it, I bet. But no one read it.
tldr: If a tree falls in the ToS, and no one reads it, does it crush you?
*note: I over-blew that. But it was like 200 pages on my iPhone last time I updated my ToS agreement. That’s prohibitive.
OF INTEREST: There’s an app that will show you the data. Big ups to @sisypheantask for mentioning it. I’m going to check out my phone when I recharge my Macbook.
-Phill