The dreaded Terms and Conditions. We all know nobody reads them, even getting angry when they have to scroll to the bottom of the page to pretend they’ve read them. However many don’t realize that checking that “Agree” checkbox is signing away a valuable part of themselves, their information. Many of these Terms and Conditions give companies the right to do basically whatever they want with your information, whether utilized by themselves or sold to other companies. Suddenly similar products to what you just bought on Amazon show up in advertisements, or you’re getting emails from stores you just visited even though you never gave them any of your information. We live in a world where companies can know essentially everything about you, from your demographic to products you like to where you’ve been. Most don’t realize this occurs, or even if they do realize they have no problem with it. However, is this practice ethical?
The argument for this practice being ethical is fairly straightforward. The use of your data is an implied cost toward the service you are being provided. If companies couldn’t profit off your data, their services would be more expensive. In the case of “free” services, without profiting off user data these services would no longer be free. Most are ok with receiving personalized advertisements if it means Facebook remains free and Amazon continues to provide cheap shipping. I fall into this category. I find that if companies are using your data to “subsidize” costs to the user, and their practices fall in-line with their Terms and Conditions (and are legal), the company is acting ethically. While I am ok with the theory of online advertisement, we know that in practice companies do not always act this ethically. Often companies will act against their Terms and Conditions, thinking users will never find out. Maybe they’ll hide shady or outright illegal terms. Also, companies certainly have the right to not pass on savings to users, but it certainly seems they are acting less ethically.
I actually got a first-hand introduction to the methods used in data collection/analyzation in my data mining class. I was given user data, user demographics, and tried to come up with a model to predict something about the user given this data, whether or not the user utilizes a screen lock on their phone. Basically I wanted to figure out what type of people would forget to use screen locks (age, gender, etc.) so a company could know to send reminders to these types of people to use screen locks. This starts to fall into the uncanny valley of categorization mentioned in The Atlantic article; it would be a little unsettling to realize you’re the only person getting emails from company security because you’re the only person forgetting to use a screen lock. However, this information would certainly be beneficial to companies.
However, there is the dark side of data storage that Kate Kochetkova brings up in her article. We inherently trust every single company whose services we use to handle our data securely. Just by visiting a website we are “using their services” and often give them permission to store our data. There are probably a lot of company’s websites we visit that we wouldn’t necessarily trust to handle our data well. Legally, they may only be required to handle the data in according to their Terms and Conditions. Ethically, they are held to a higher standard. I believe a company should figure out what the companies they sell their data to actually do with the data. They shouldn’t blindly sell to any buyer. There is also an implicit responsibility to keep our data safe, however this is often a legal responsibility as well.
I do use an advertisement blocker, however now that I am thinking about it I am not sure if they are always ethical. Many companies are dependent on advertisements to survive, so it is not really ethical to use their services but deny them any “payment.” However, many of these blockers allow you to unblock advertisements for websites you believe deserve “payment.” I may start unblocking sites I use for free so they get they get the compensation they deserve.
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