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To Agree Or To Not Agree?

What are terms and conditions anyway, and how do they apply?

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To Agree Or To Not Agree?
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Get a text from a friend about a crazy Uber driver? A couple minutes later I scroll through Twitter to see an Uber ad in the midst of evasive tweets about how annoyed everyone is with who knows what or why.

Buy a watch for a boyfriend during the Christmas holidays? The same Fossil watch pops up on my Facebook homepage under the words, “You might be interested in this…”

Change my relationship status on Facebook to “single” and make it private, because I don’t care to let everyone know I’m perpetually single and well on my way to nun-hood (like I, in fact, just did)? I then scroll past unwanted Match.com and ChristianMingle.com advertisements on Instagram.

None of this is a coincidence. In fact, the more I see it the creepier it becomes. Ever since I watched the “Terms and Conditions May Apply” documentary produced by Cullen Hoback for a mass communication course last semester, these terms and conditions have become incessantly noticeable to me.

We all do it, create account after account on social media, plug in all of our personal information and link it to other sites. By that point, after providing our social security numbers and the blood of a lamb to create a strong password, we’re ready to check off “I Agree” to the seemingly never-ending list of terms and conditions that no one reads a single word of.

What very few of us know is what exactly is included in these terms and conditions. I sure as heck don’t, besides the fact that I’ve learned they give social media corporations access to nearly every aspect of our lives in order to make us easy targets for advertisers.

I’ve taken it upon myself to read some of Facebook's service policies, as much as I could bear, and I’ve found it might not be near as bad as it used to be, but I still have my doubts.

I found the policies very easy to navigate, as opposed to the big blocks of writing we see when first creating accounts on different media sites.

It seems Facebook starts off to say that our privacy is of utmost importance to them, however, it goes on to read that our names, content, information, etc.… are susceptible to third parties and advertisers who target us individually for their own benefits.


If you read Facebook's Data Policy, it outlines a clear explanation of what we provide for them, and how they use this data.

I’ve discovered in my research that it may not necessarily be Facebook we should be afraid of, but the third party organizations associated with it, as well as potential “new owners” who can take over at any time, gaining access to all of our information.

The more applications and websites we link with Facebook, the more terms and conditions we agree to without reading them. Imagine how many of those terms contradict one another and overwrite something Facebook initially promised us.

Now, I may be assuming things and overthinking, but it all seems like an interconnected web of horror to me.

Maybe service policies for social media outlets have changed since 2013, when Hoback’s documentary was released, however, something that hasn’t changed is the fact that we, being so accustomed to instant gratification, still blindly hit “I Agree” every time those annoying, long blocks of small type jump out at us on-screen.

And who am I kidding? Besides the minimal reading of Facebook's terms and conditions I perused today, I more than likely won’t go back and look over all policies of the social media platforms I use.

A Huffington Post article on Hoback’s documentary states, “In fact, the film points out that for typical Internet users, it would take 180 hours – the equivalent of one full month of work a year – to fully read all the terms and conditions attached to their favorite websites.”

Our impatient souls, unfortunately, aren’t going to sit through 180 minutes of reading anything on the Internet that doesn’t pertain to “Rally Possoms,” “How to do This, That and Whatever,” or “20 Reasons Why…”

Why is this, you ask? Well, blog posts like this one and those that are written in list form are straightforward and easy to read through, whereas terms and conditions are purposely written in a style that will attract, well, no one.

In a Q-and-A for TNW, Hoback is asked if he were the kind of person to instantly hit “yes” to terms and conditions, to which he replies, “Well, terms and conditions are designed not to be read. They’re designed to be invisible, and they’re designed to be unapproachable.”

Before this blog post gets as boring as terms and conditions, let me wrap it up. We’re allowing Facebook, along with tons of other social media platforms, to make a profit off of our “not-so-private” information.

The following screenshot is a list of definitions of what Facebook means by the “information,” “content,” “data,” and “posts” they “use” when we agree to their terms.

By hitting “I Agree,” we’re are blindly saying yes to keeping some information for only our friends to see, all the while allowing third party organizations to use our information in order to target their advertisements in the right places.

What we should be wondering is, is anything we post private at all?

Reading the terms and conditions is entirely your decision. I haven’t read it fully, but I’ve done enough research to know we’ve all been heavily misled.

Mark Zuckerberg says so himself in “Terms and Conditions May Apply,” we’re stupid to trust him.

You can hear more about this in BYOD's video, Terms and Conditions May Apply with Cullen Hogback on YouTube.

The actual documentary, "Terms and Conditions May Apply," can be found on Amazon, Vimeo, iTunes, or Vudu.

I leave you all with one question: to agree or to not agree? You decide.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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