Terms and Conditions and Consequences

I know what you’re thinking….”yeah yeah…wait…and what?” but It’s true. Terms and conditions can have consequences. In light of the Cambridge Analytica breach of facebooks user profiles we are continuing to analyze what happened to the tens of thousands of User Profiles, we really need to have a better understanding of what it is we’re actually agreeing to when we click the continue button when you are signing up for things.

 

Here’s the thing, Whenever I sign up for a service of some variety I actually do go through (ahem…most of) the terms and conditions. I don’t speak a lot of legalese (the legal language like “the user saves harmless the provider from any damages based on….”blah blah blah) but I am able to decipher some of the things that are written in terms and conditions. 90% of the time, they are asking you to be an idiot or a villain, which means that for most of us, so long as you’re not using your account while petting your white cat sitting in a hollowed out volcano lair (small Austin Powers reference) then you should have no issues with how they want you to use the service.

 

There is, however consequences to not paying any attention whatsoever and blindly clicking the “accept button”. This was discovered by a group of students a few years ago who signed up for a new social media service called namedrop.com. What they thought they were doing was signing up for what was supposed to be the next big thing in social media, but what they actually did was participate in an experiment conceived by the York University of Toronto working with the University of Connecticut. most of the people who signed up didn’t read the terms of service, only to later be told that amongst the various terms of service that as apart of using namedrop.com they would be required to give up their future first born children! This was an experiment to see how many people would read the terms of service, so no first-born children were exchanged. If you want to know more about this there was an article where I read about it that you can click to see it here.

 

I get that there are lots of things that companies like Facebook and iTunes need to be legally prepared for. For the companies who are providing these products, they need to be able to protect themselves from lawsuits and whatnot if people misuse their products. so they need to be able to issue a legal “terms of service” contract so that the people using their products (hopefully) won’t misuse their products. For the users it’s important for them to both know how to use the products they’re buying (or services they’re subscribing to) correctly or to their best use.

 

Here’s my thing with terms of service. The one thing that I don’t like is that whenever one small section of the terms of service changes, the entire document needs to be reissued and re-authorized. I’m not a lawyer (so this is in NO WAY a legal opinion) but I think it would be easier for all consumers if when they signed up for a service they got the entire document, but any time there was a change they were given notification of exactly what had changed and the document got sent would highlight exactly where the changes were. I would imagine that any lawyer reading this would be happy to go into exact detail as to why that’s a bad idea, but I’m an information manager by trade, so efficiency and simplicity is my thing.

 

The big thing that happened this year as far as terms of service was the Facebook information debacle. The thing about that was that the fault was not Facebook’s, it was Alexander Kogan who took the information from Facebook and sold it to Cambridge Analytica. The fact that he was able to obtain the information in the first place was actually apart of the terms of service. now obviously Facebook has changed their terms of service since then but the trick is that the users very likely didn’t read the terms of service and because of that there were the consequences that happened. How do you fix this? You, and any other use I might add, can go through Facebooks settings and make it so that you don’t share information. The trick is that YOU have to set up your settings to be that way.

 

The responsibility for what happens when you sign up for a service is two-sided. On the side of the provider they have to (and usually do) provide the terms of service for the users so that they know how to use the product. On the side of the user, it is our responsibility to not only use the services we sign up for properly but understand how we have to protect our own information and fully utilize the ways that the provider has given us to do so. This includes combing through the settings to make sure that we have everything JUST right, and to make sure we are sharing exactly what we want, and nothing more.

 

Have you looked through the settings in the services you use? Who do you think is more responsible for protecting your information?