 |
| "I Signed By Accident!" |
Something terrifying was suggested in the recent Senate hearings with Mark Zukerberg regarding Facebook’s business structure and privacy policies. The bar got lowered. I thought that hit bottom on November 8, 2016. But in today's hearings, Sen. John Kennedy implied that Zuckerberg should go rewrite his terms “in plain English” so people can actually understand them.
The abuse of Facebook by Cambridge Analytica to target propaganda is a problem with Cambridge Analytica. Yes, constraints on the ability to create fake user accounts would help, but these are not a realistic solution. You can’t pull this back. The genie is out of the bottle, the nature of the internet has a life of its own and to quote Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park… “Life finds a way”.
I agree that the “legal-ese” of terms of use statements are over the top. I suspect that it’s the result of years of legal input and entanglements over being sued for the slightest thing in our highly litigious society. And sure, you could ‘streamline’ and reduce the user agreement details down to something more ‘digestible’ to the ‘average user’. But what does that say about our country and society?
I don’t think that people’s inability to focus on and read anything with more than two-syllable words and longer than 4 sentences should be overlooked as a far larger part of the problem. We don’t need to keep “dumbing down” things to support an ignorant and lazy society. We need to up the game, demand responsibility for actions, and for fuck’s sake, make education essential to survival.
Who doesn’t know or understand that Facebook, Google, YouTube and every other online entity that you don’t pay to use, mines and uses your data for ad targeting, analytics and more? That’s implicit. Documented. It’s understood. And if you don’t know that, then YOU are at fault. You can’t backtrack and say “oh wait, that thing you told me to read and agree to, well I didn’t read it but I agreed to it, so that’s not fair. You tricked me with too many words.”
BTW what I think is far more worthy of time and regulation is the deceptive language in things like “airline ticket cancellation insurance” which implies a right to cancel but doesn’t explain the specifics up front as being only under very rigid and selective conditions like natural disasters or your own hospitalization, but not because you had a change of heart about your travel plans. Or the same for “extended warranties”. And don’t get me started on the release forms for medical procedures. Why are those still allowed?
And why, when we’re faced with the existence of factions that abuse a social network are we more obsessed with belittling and demeaning the business that got abused instead of going after the abusers? How about putting some of that "border wall" money towards regulating THAT?
We’re a nation full of idiots. Short-attention-span, conspiracy-theory-driven, history-denying, science-ignorant idiots.