Netflix has done it again. Although a little outdated (by about 4 years, but we’ll let it slide), the Netflix documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply is a must watch.
I feel that my generation has become desensitized to privacy. What really is privacy anymore- I know what pretty much all my friends are doing at any moment during the day. I even know what people who I only consider mere acquaintances are doing on a regular basis. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+, the world has never been more connected. So what does this mean about our privacy?
Laying the documentary out in such a way that helps to start to help clear the weeds out of the way of the giant mess of what the government and corporations have done to our privacy begins the documentary. Arguable, this is one of the more terrifying arguments that the documentary presents. The privacy policies have become such a mess that consumers don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. We think all these services are “free” when really the only people that are losing their freedom is us.
Interestingly enough, the documentary states that it would take 180 hours out of every year to sit and thoroughly read the Terms and Conditions of the sites that we use.
In one of my classes the other day we watched a Ted talk about online deception. A comment made by the speaker was that humans started speaking before written language was developed. Therefore anything anyone said pre-written language has disappeared- there is no hard copy or record of anything that they said. Much like them, their words have faded and disappeared as time has passed. What’s terrifying now is that is not the case. Everything is documented. Everything on your Facebook stays there- even the things you delete! Just because you delete a post doesn’t mean anything. It only means that you have deleted the post from you seeing it but it has already been stored in the giant database that corporations like Facebook has on us.
If you’ve ever been concerned or curious about those terms and conditions that no one ever reads, I encourage you to give this documentary a watch. It’s only a 1 hour and 20 minutes long watch and extremely information dense.
Oh by the way, if you’re reading, Hi US Government.
Scary!!