Day 9 - Terms of Service; Didn’t Read
Other day, my friend and I were debating if Facebook and other popular internet services can mess with our data as well as share it with government agencies if agencies demand it. He was of the opinion they can't do that, people would strongly react and stop using the service or even delete their accounts. I duckduckgo-ed (sorry, I don't use Google for my internet searches) about Terms of Service of popular websites and turns out they are too long. Also, they are usually written in heavy legalese and we're not law students. On further research we found a project called Terms of Service; Didn't Read.
The project was started in 2012 in Berlin to help fix the "biggest lie on the web": > Almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time.
Since then, it has become a crowd-sourced (meaning relies on internet users for contributions) open-source project which analyzes and monitors (which is kind of important because Apple and other companies change their ToS all the time) the Terms of Service for major internet based services.
Below is comparison between Google and DuckDuckGo (a search engine that unlike Google protects user privacy):
They have got analysis on even more popular internet products / apps such as YouTube, Facebook and Amazon. These summaries will really give a new perspective about the internet services we have grown to rely on over the last decade. It might scare you (it did to me) and even lead you to change how you interact with these services.
Have something to comment about internet privacy or about the post? Tweet me at @devarsh or write to me at devarsh[dot]ruparelia[at]gmail[dot]com.

















