Good afternoon and welcome back to another post from ToBeSecured. Another Wednesday to learn how to protect your privacy and another post for you to share with your family, friends, and peers. There's a major project I have currently pending that you all should be on the lookout for and I hope once it is announced that you all are as excited as I am. Other than that, continue to share my blog and make suggestions of the content you want me to discuss or may feel is important.
Today, I just want to point out a post I have been seeing my followers screenshot and post, including celebrities, that has my mind wondering. So, I will include the screenshot in my post, but I am sure most of you have come across it on your timeline. When we think about applications and the way they are developed, implemented, designed, deployed, etc., it's all a planning process that takes a plethora of thinking. Now, within that planning process is users of the application and how they will be affected. Some developers put user experience on the back burner and only comply with rights and SLA's (Service-level agreements) because it is the legal thing to do and they try to avoid lawsuits which results in loss of money. With that being said, how does rules or policies often become established? In this case, it is better known as terms and conditions along with a privacy policy. Companies such as Facebook and Instagram have documentation about their products, applications, how you use them, what you are agreeing to, what they collect, etc. Commonly, they don't always release this information or much of the less people even care to learn about it if it was right in their face. This is the common issue social media users often deal with and they bring these issues upon themselves. It's equivalent to signing up for a class and you're given a course description, the name of the instructor who is teaching the class, and the information the instructor knows about you, but you do not take the time to ask questions and learn about it because you are so focused on taking the class based upon a recommendation or requirement. Privacy is a right. We all make choices at the end of the day and that's the truth, whether good or bad.
If you regularly use the Internet, software or smartphones, you’ve probably agreed to at least a few hundred terms of service agreements in your life. Chances are you probably haven’t read every single one of those agreements, however, even though very few people actually read terms of service agreements, they can still contain some pretty important information. A legitimate terms of service agreement is legally binding between the parties who agree to it. However, there are a few things that can make terms of service agreements unenforceable. One of the most common unenforceable terms is the unilateral amendment provision, which gives a company the right to change its agreement however it wants, whenever it wants, with or without notifying its customers. Courts have repeatedly found this term unenforceable in cases like Harris v. Blockbuster Inc., Douglas v. Talk America Inc. and Rodman v. Safeway, Inc., as it requires people to agree to terms that don’t even exist yet. If a company wants to include a provision like this, it generally has to notify its customers of agreement changes, provide a grace period for the changes to take effect and limit the agreement to only apply to events that happen after the agreement is amended.
Terms that allow companies to collect, store and share your personal data are also completely legal, and, sadly, many big companies now have provisions like that in their agreements. This can be a huge problem, as some of those companies are not equipped to securely store such large amounts of sensitive data. The high number of recent data breaches from those companies have likely contributed to the sharp increase in identity theft cases, and the increasing need for identity theft protection. Personal data terms can also give companies ownership over your information, as demonstrated by Instagram when it tried to amend its terms of service with a provision that would let it sell user photos for advertisements without asking those users for their consent or offering them payment. Instagram deleted this term when faced with public backlash, but it was still legal for it to do that.
The post you all are seeing isn't real and most of you are reposting the screenshot because you see others posting it to their timeline. If you continue to follow blindly and support people, posts, and causes without doing your own research, then you will always believe inaccurate information and never be informed of what is legitimate. And the post isn't new because it has floated around from Facebook to Instagram plenty of times randomly, which usually is started by someone looking for others to follow their actions. Be careful and remain open and receptive, but also ask questions and do research. Always read before agreeing or signing up for anything and remember everything that is posted to the internet is not reliable nor legit.
If you would like to discuss further, please leave a comment or ask a question. I'd love to chat with my readers and hear your thoughts. Thank you for dropping in and remember ToBeSecured!
Comments