How many of us read the fine print before using Internet
services? We don’t have much choice but
to accept them, but that could ultimately be dangerous, according to a new
documentary by Cullen Hoback, “Terms and Conditions May Apply”, from Variance
Pictures (also Hyrax, Topiary, Roco).
The biggest threat most computer users is still probably
hackers and criminals, but the likelihood of corporate misuse of information,
which is much more pervasive than most users realize, seems to increase, and
most of all is the risk of government misuse, which has more recently attracted
attention because of the Wikileaks and Snowden NSA scandals.
We meet some interesting characters: Barrett Brown, from Hacktivists; Max Schrems, a handsome Austrian law student
with accent-free English who launches litigation, and toward the end, Mark
Zuckerberg himself (not Jesse Eisenberg or Ashton Kutcher), chased down by
reporters near his new Palo Alto home, right after the film has displayed his
notorious “The ‘trusted me’” email.
There has been a lot of talk in the media about “metadata”
or “pen register” surveillance, but the film presents at least three cases
where ordinary people were detained or investigated for apparent threats in
social media, all discovered by intelligence or police text-trolling software,
from materials given to law enforcement by service providers. In one case, a man in Ireland was detained at
LAX for days because of a supposed threat made on Twitter. In another, the NYPD visited a man just a few
days after he had moved into a new apartment because of a Facebook
posting. In still another, a man in
Britain was detained as a possible security threat because of the 2011 Royal
Wedding based on out-of-context interpretation of a social media post. It was not clear whether these posts had been
intended for everyone, or had been whitelisted for just friends or followers,
in which case the police really would have been reading private content. The film did not mention the case of a
teenager in Texas prosecuted for a misread Facebook threat (Internet Safety
blog, July 3, 2013.
The film also points out a problem with metadata snooping:
police could misinterpret a consumer’s search engine requests or
purchases. A writer might be searching
to learn about how a terror attack could come about in a novel, not in real
life. The film also mentions (as does
Daniel Solove in his 2011 book “Nothing to Hide” (reviewed July 23, 2013 on the Books blog) that
when personal or activity information is held by a third party, there is no
Fourth Amendment protection from searches.
A person has “nothing to hide” until he or she does, the
film says. One quick refutation comes from the fact that people sometimes have their credit scores lowered because other customers of the establishments where they use their credit cards have poor repayment histories.
I wondered if electronic searching could have caused my 2005
incident when I was a substitute teacher (“BillBoushka”” blog, July 27, 2007). But it sounds unlikely that public school
systems would have been having
contractors run Internet searches to match up the names of teachers with all
possible troubling word combinations, and even if something popped up, it would
need to be interpreted. Of course, in
the film, people were detained just on the basis of automated Internet
background investigations (triggered possibly by intelligence activity) without
concern for context.
The film gives an interesting anecdote about Mark Zuckerberg
at Harvard, not included in “The Social Network”. That is, Mark’s buddies in the dorm asked
him, “Why would an individual want a personal website, anyway”, sometime in the
early fall of 2004. I wonder if
Zuckerberg knew about me and my “hppub.com” and “doaskdotell.com” sites and my “Do
Ask Do Tell” sites and even my participation as a COPA litigant (under
Electronic Frontier Foundation) on the theory that COPA could destroy the “free
entry” system for Internet self-publishing.
(The bigger dangers have come from SOPA, and now the proposal to weaken
the CDA Section 230 concerning downstream liability of service providers –
itself a potentially good topic for documentary film .) The reason he might have known is that there
had been some controversy over Harvard’s banning military recruiters in 2003,
when Zuckerberg was a freshman, over “don’t ask don’t tell”, and so he would
have heard about it. With any curiosity
at all, he could well have found me by search engines and realized what one
person could do. But what he would add
was social context – the idea that some publishing is layered within certain
communities (like schools) or lists of people.
Privacy settings are predicated on nuances in the way these white-lists
work.
The film also makes a good point on the fact that “terms and
conditions” are often the most troublesome with “free content”. But any paid hosting service will have a TOS
or “acceptable use policy”.
The official site is here.
I saw the film at the West End Cinema in Washington DC late
on a Sunday afternoon before a small audience, but I had missed the chance for director
QA yesterday to see “Jobs” first.
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