South Park’s first episode of season fifteen is titled HumanCentiPad. Riffing on both the recent release of the snuffy, visceral film Human Centipad and consumers’ willingness to get shat on, South Park centers Kyle’s stomach-churning fate on our general refusal to read the terms and conditions that we nearly automatically agree to with the simple click of a digital check box.
I’m not above this practice, and I’m fully aware that convenience and my need for rapid gratification impels me to cursorily skim the contents of an agreement, noting what I assume to be okay and avoiding anything that could be perceived as negative just so I can get that day’s crossword puzzle from the New York Times.
The gist of this episode, as most South Park episodes do, is to point out the extremes of an issue and point out that there are choices. Namely, there’s a choice to click and a choice not to. There’s a choice to read the terms and a choice not to. But what we’re really getting down to is: if you choose not to read the terms and conditions, then you don’t get to bitch about them.
The new documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply is the latest entry into the discourse of secrecy and privacy. Coincidentally released just a few weeks after Edward Snowden’s existence was made evident to most anyone with Internet access, Terms and Conditions posits that checking these boxes that assert “I agree” has allowed the government to spy on us, track our information, and use it for their own gain without our knowledge, until now.
The basic thesis of the film is hard to argue with. The government does keep an eye on us, and this should not be a novel revelation to anyone who paid attention to the last few terms of both George W. Bush and Barak Obama. September 11th created a justification – rightly or wrongly – to ramp up national security. And, like the fear that Communists were trying to bring down this country or the fear of Nazi infiltration, wiretaps, selective searches, and eavesdropping exist in a fluctuating gray area of legality.
The doc’s position that we “get comfortable with the default” of systems is a reasonable one with which to agree. We are creatures of convenience. We want our apps when we want them. We want our angry birds. We want our streaming video. But this position breeds and irony. If we are so programmed to choose the default of convenience, perhaps we deserve to be monitored and sheltered. Now, the previous was not a ringing endorsement of wiretapping and its ilk, but Terms and Conditions bases most of its drama on the notion that Facebook, Google, Verizon, et. al. are in the wrong because they don’t make it easy for us to read the conditions they set forth.
One statistic offered is that we would each spend over 100 hours per year reading the terms and conditions that we agree to. Yet, I’m not sure that the companies for which we check these boxes can be blamed for this. In a society so prone to lawsuits that chain restaurants must post caloric content on their menus to avoid consumers filing suit in the future, can these social media companies be blamed for putting everything on the table before the consumer checks a box?
Yes, it is truly disconcerting that Facebook, Google, et. al. have changed their terms of service a number of times, and each of them has a variation on the following line: “By agreeing to our terms of service, you allow [company] to use your information to investigate or prevent illegal activities.” This certainly feels like something out of Minority Report. However, could you imagine the number of lawsuits that would be filed if a few parties were using Facebook to enact a plan of destruction and Facebook had to plead ignorance?
And yes, it is strange that Google finishes my sentences before I type anything into a search bar, but we are in the most capitalistic country in the world. Google exists to generate ads and make sales. That is what makes it – and Facebook – so valuable. Free social arenas are the kitchens of friends. They are park benches – so long as you didn’t have to pay for parking, I suppose.
Facebook and Google are optional. Yes, they make life convenient, and they prevent us from wasting nanoseconds that we could use playing Farmville – or at least annoying friends into playing Farmville – but in the end of the day, they are voluntarily used services.
In the end, it’s not that Terms and Conditions May Apply doesn’t provide necessary and valuable information. The flaw in the film is that they present the information ominously as if we’ve been trapped. We haven’t been trapped. We’ve volunteered for this. We can’t want to be omnipresent and not sacrifice privacy.
