I read every terms of service (TOS) before signing up for a site.  Yes, I am that one person who reads them.  Companies, you wondered who that person was?  It’s me.  Hi!

I read them because I don’t want to have any regrets.  Just because a site has a terrible terms of service doesn’t mean that I won’t create an account.  It’s just that I use that site differently than I would have if the terms were different.

While it would be nice if everyone read every section of every terms of service, I also know that most people don’t have the time to do so.  So this post will teach you how to quickly scan the terms and figure out how YOU want to use their site (if at all).  Bookmark it and come back to it every time you have a new site to use.

“You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license”

There is language a site needs to put in their terms of service to protect themselves. For instance, they need to ask you a royalty-free license or you could claim in the future that they owe you money because you brought traffic to their site with your content. They need the license to be worldwide because they need to make sure they’re covered regardless of where their users live.

BUT… there is a red flag word in there: sub-license.  This means the site can license your content to a third party without contacting you or asking your permission (because you gave them permission with the TOS).  They do not need to be granted this type of license in order to run their site, but they do need to do this to make money in the future because your content is their asset.

Sites that tell you they can sub-license your content: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter all have very broad licenses that state they can sell your content to third parties.  I have accounts on all of those sites, but I do not upload any images, videos, or words that I wouldn’t mind if they ended up on a billboard on I-95.  I am also cognizant that anything I upload could be used to promote a product or idea that I wouldn’t want to promote or endorse.  So… I tread carefully and consume more than I upload.

“You give us a perpetual and irrevocable license”

Before you sign up for a site, make sure you can leave a site.  And make sure you can take your content too.  What if you upload photos of your child, and then your child grows up and begs you to take their image off the Internet?  With certain sites, that won’t be a problem.  With other sites, once you upload any content, they are allowed to perpetually and irrevocably hold onto that content.  (And with the ability to sub-license, perhaps sell that content in the future.)

You can close your account at Twitter or YouTube, and you can delete your tweet or movie, but both sites are allowed to hold on and use your content in the future.  You cannot completely close an Ancestry.com account (wish you hadn’t uploaded your family tree?), Pinterest, or WordPress.com account.  (Along with many other sites.)  Before you sign up for a new account, make sure you know if you can leave and what happens to your account and content if you do.

“Customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets”

Your data is a site’s most valuable asset.  Some sites collect more personal information than others.  Some sites, such as Netflix, disclose non-personal information to third parties.  They may know X number of people watched Y film, but they don’t know the names of all the people in the X category.  Other sites, such as Amazon, admit that if they ever sell their company, they’re selling your personal information too.

It is somewhat impossible to utilize the online world without having your personal information collected.  I look for sites that are open about their practices vs. those who leave it vague.  I trust transparency.  At least I know what I am getting.

“Does not claim ownership of any Content that you post”

Make sure the terms of service state something along the lines of “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”  In other words, you want to make sure that YOU retain the copyright to YOUR work, and that by uploading the content, you are not transferring your copyright to the site.

It is unusual for a site to ask you to transfer the copyright.  Usually the site will ask you to grant them a license to use your work as they wish, though the creator still retains the copyright.

“We may revise these Terms from time to time”

Be careful with sites that tell you that they can make major changes to their terms of service and the most they will do is post them somewhere on their site.  Unless you are continuously going back and checking the site’s blog or TOS page for changes, chances are, you will not know when changes take place.  Even without seeing and signing off on those changes, by continuing to use the site, you accept the new terms.

What you want is a site that will contact you when they make major changes to their policy.  That is a site that operates with transparency.  Even better is a site that will allow users to weigh in on major changes to their prior policies.

Fine Print

Do a quick scan for the term “third parties.”  You want to know how using a site connects you and your content to third parties.  Are they sharing your information with third parties?  Selling your content to third parties?  You need to know where your information and content may travel.  Will it travel?  Who can say.  But once you give a site that right, they are allowed to use it.

There are other red flags I watch for, such as giving up my right to legal action (“You agree to defend, indemnify and hold us harmless”), or the jurisdiction for any lawsuits (I’m not flying to another state in order to participate in a lawsuit).  But they’re not deal breakers.

In fact, very few terms are deal breakers for me when it comes to using a site.  Will I upload content if I don’t love the terms?  Hell no.  But will I create an account so I can follow other people and read along, yes, and I’ll upload content that I’m okay with being out of my control.  Sort of.

I’m not a lawyer; I’m just an online user who is very interested in the way sites collect information and do business.

I was going to call this “please read the fine print” but the reality is that since we’re no longer dealing with printed words on paper, we’re no longer really talking about fine print.  We can make the font on our screen as large as we want it.  And those far-reaching terms are no longer being hidden in the middle of contracts in tiny print.  The information is there, in black-and-white, on the screen, in simple terms.

Almost like they actually want us to see it.  To see just how much information (and control over that information) we’re giving them.

Image: Bfishadow via Flickr

Yet they know that very few people read those contracts before they hit “agree.”

After all, it would take an average user 180 hours per year to read through all the terms and conditions for the sites he/she accesses.  Think about how many sites you go on daily.  Not just the ones where you’ve stored an account; every place you visit on the Web.

Gulp.

I think this is an important but uncomfortable topic.  My mind has been turning it over by myself for the last few days.  Now I’m dumping everything I’m thinking about on you.  I’ll also preface this by saying that I just finished the Hunger Games.  That may be clouding my thoughts.

Hopefully you’ll take the time to read through this post and join the conversation.

*******

A few nights ago, Josh and I watched the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply.  Josh jokingly told me about it, saying that it fed into my “it’s not paranoia if they actually are out to get you” mentality.  He’s teasing but I am someone who reads contracts very very seriously and obviously likes to discuss this a lot.

I think a lot about what I put on the Web as well as even in private communication such as email or text message.  Because it is scanned.  The Internet is archived.  It goes beyond our archived Tweets at the Library of Congress or the fact that it is impossible in most cases to actually remove an account in its entirety from a site such as Facebook.  It goes into the fact that even if it looks as if it’s gone, it’s really not gone.

For instance, when you permanently delete your account at Facebook, you are stopping yourself and other users from being able to access your information.  But what about Facebook itself?  Can they still access your information?  They are completely honest and open about it: yes.

• You will not be able to regain access to your account again.
• Most personally identifiable information associated with it is removed from our database. This includes information like your email address, mailing address, and IM screen name. Some personally identifiable information may remain, such as your name if you sent a message to someone else. [Most and some are vague terms, no?]
• Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain in our servers for technical reasons, but this material is disassociated from any personal identifiers and completely inaccessible to other people using Facebook. [Note: While inaccessible to users, Facebook keeps these items of an indeterminate amount of time.  And as someone said in the film, anything that can be disassociated can also be reassociated down the line if the TOS changes, as if often does.]

See, I’m not being paranoid… right?  Okay, yes, I sound like I’m about to go off the grid, but please read on because the reality is that I DO have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a blog, email, etc.  I use TOS mostly to think about the way I use sites vs. not using them at all.  And at this point, as the twins move online, I’m thinking about it in overdrive as we try to teach them what to post, email, text, and what to save for face-to-face conversations.

*******

So what is my biggest fear that stems from thinking about the TOS of online sites and mobile devices?

Let’s start with this: once something goes out, you really don’t have a way of getting it back.  I’m not just talking about blog posts.  This is true for the pictures we send, the emails we write, our text messages, and even Siri searches.  If you think about that too long and hard, your stomach (if it’s like mine) will start hurting.  I mean, yes, we all practice circumspection, but how can we know what society will be like in the future?  Or how my own opinions will change?

Things that are neutral today could become a marker tomorrow.  All profiling has a first day of profiling; a moment beforehand where we’re not profiling, and all the moments afterward when we do.

See, gulp.

What if Candy Crushing becomes anathema in the future?

*******

Every blog post I write goes out in an RSS feed and gets delivered to blog readers.  If I delete the post, every reader subscribed to me still has a copy in their RSS-feed reader.  If I delete an image, it’s still there too.  My blog (like all of our blogs) has been archived by the Wayback Machine.  Mine has been archived 172 times.  Again, it means you can pretty much access it forever regardless of what I do on my end.

Not really a big deal on one hand because I mostly talk about Candy Crush.  But what if I wrote about more controversial topics than speckled doughnuts?

It’s more what I DON’T know that worries me since we all know that there is plenty that we don’t know.  It’s the stuff that pops up in the news.  It’s the TOS that change overnight without warning.  The stuff that we’ve all sort of assumed but still cringe when it’s confirmed.  How are they using my data?  Mostly to sell stuff to me or to sell stuff to others, by the way it sounds.  But these sites are collecting a shit-ton of data, and we — the users — are their assets.  That’s how the value of a company such as Facebook was decided before it went public: what are its assets?  People and their data.

Do they really need all of that information?  Or is any information valuable and thereby sell-able in the future?  Someone will want it.  So even if Facebook is only using it to target ads, how will the people they pass my information along to the future use it?

I am a careful Internet and mobile device user, but even I know that most of my caution is a moot point: the information is being collected.  Even if I opt-out of the online world, I still need to contend with three billion other ways my data is being collected from what I order at restaurants to what I buy with my credit card.  Is there any point in trying to hold onto a shred of privacy in a world that is somewhat determined to ensure that I have no privacy?

Maybe?

Should we hold particularly tightly to those shreds of privacy since we know they’re mostly an illusion?  And how tightly?

*******

The documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply is a little choppy.  Sometimes it felt a little more akin to a 20/20 special report than a movie.  Sometimes it veered a little too much into the mood music.  But still, it’s a good starting point to show the twins to drive home the idea that even their silly Siri conversations are being cataloged somewhere.  And all those data points, while made “anonymous” in theory, can easily be made deanonymized now by a little poking, or by the company itself down the road.

Knowing what someone searches for online is sort of like knowing their thoughts.  Like running your fingers through their brain.

I think a lot about how to make sure that I’m not giving more than I need to.  I start with other Internet users out there, and I don’t write things that I don’t feel okay posting and having out there for eternity.  It means that I don’t get to discuss things I’d love to unload off my chest and discuss.  I don’t put up pictures I’m not okay losing control of as they float through the back-end of various sites.  There are plenty of fun things I find that I’d love to post on Facebook or link to on Twitter, but I don’t.  Because I like to leave at least a few pieces of the puzzle missing?  Does it matter?

And then I think about the companies themselves.  I opt-out of a lot of fun things.

A good example is 23 and Me.  When I first heard about it, it sounded really cool.  Totally up my alley, especially as a health writer.  I’d personally love all that cool info, but the company has ties to Google, and we’ve already seen just how seriously Google takes my privacy.  As the new president of the board said in Forbes,

Selling kits to consumers is the first phase of that eventual outcome. That is the only aspect of the business model that we’ve announced so far.

Before I try out something potentially risky that provides even more than the normal shit-ton of information we leave on the average Facebook page, I do want to know the whole business model.  But even 23 and Me can’t possibly predict how valuable that information will be down the road or how someone with new technology in place will want to use it. And because they know that they can’t predict what sort of gold mine they’re sitting on, they hedge their bets with a pretty scary terms of service and privacy statement that they admit can change at any time:

23andMe may make changes to the TOS from time to time. When these changes are made, 23andMe will make a new copy of the TOS available on its website and any new additional terms will be made available to you from within, or through, the affected Services.

In other words, they can change the copy on their site.  They may or may not notify you if they change the language in one of the existing terms.  They will only notify you if they add new terms.  The onus is on the user to continuously check the TOS.  While this is true of many many sites, the sites I tend to use also have a huge user base so I generally hear within a very short period of time if a new TOS has been uploaded.  23 and Me just doesn’t have the user base nor the media watching it like a hawk.

What do I think is the worst that can happen?  I don’t even know.  I mean, so what if a company out there knows about my genes?  What if they tell others?  After all, my doctor has a sample of my DNA.

But I guess that’s my fear: the fact that I have so many questions.  I have no clue how it may or may not bite me in the ass in the future.

*******

If you’re one of those people who clicks “accept” without diving into the details, first and foremost, don’t panic.  I know that sounds ridiculous after I just spent the top portion of this post essentially fomenting you into a panic.  But don’t.  It’s never too late to gather information and change course.

The documentary is a good place to start.  It covers a lot of interesting topics:

• He points out the language you should be wary of in a TOS.
• He talks about how Google said in the past that cookies were anonymous, but changed their policy two years later to admit that they can (and will) turn over that information which isn’t really anonymous if presented with certain legal documents.
• The value of personal data, which is what makes Facebook one of the most valuable companies in the world.
• Companies have no incentive (except to retain users) to make your information private.  We may want them to out of common human decency, but the only way that data is actually valuable is if they can use it.  An example is how Google merged its services into one very valuable profile.
• Stored Communications Act and third party doctrine.
• The history of Carrier IQ software on phones.
• The concept of retroactive searches carried out on stored data and the construction of Bluffdale
• How Facebook changed its default settings over time…

This is a screenshot from the film of how the default settings looked on Facebook back in 2005.

The first ring is stuff you share with friends.  The second ring is friends of friends.  The third ring is all Facebook users.  The fourth ring is the entire Internet.  In other words, back in 2005, non-Facebook users could see nothing on Facebook.  Facebook users could see someone’s name, where they lived, their gender, and their networks.  By default, that is.  People could hide those details too.  The site was set up for friends of friends to be able to see your wall posts, photos, and friends unless you changed that setting.  But overall, if you didn’t quite get how to tweak the settings on Facebook, you weren’t revealing everything with the world.

This is the screenshot from 2010.  Still the default privacy settings.

In other words, you no longer need to be a fellow Facebook user to see… everything.  Literally everything except your contact info and birthday is part of the default privacy settings.  Of course, when they changed the privacy settings overnight without notice on Facebook in 2009, everyone’s information was public until they went back in and adjusted their settings.  We all claim that users would revolt if they pulled that again, but the fact is, how many people would leave Facebook when we know that so many other companies are forcing our private information into the public sphere?

I operate under the assumption that nothing is private on the Internet regardless of privacy settings.

*******

There are sites such as Terms of Service, Didn’t Read that break down some general information about various sites.  YouTube is a Class D (Class E is the worst, and Class A is the best).  Google is a Class C.  Soundcloud is a Class B.  Twitpic gets a lot of thumbs down with their Class E ranking.  Most of the sites are still without ranking since the website is a labour of love by a small team.  But you can still gather a lot of information from it.

Such as did you know that iCloud can “pre-screen, move, refuse, modify and/or remove Content at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion?”  Hope you have a backup.  To be fair, telling you to back up your own data is the next section of the TOS.  Or that Amazon’s “terms may be changed any time at their discretion, without notice to the user.”

Sigh.

*******

This is a very long post.  I know that.  But there is a lot that we need to talk about when it comes to how sites are collecting and using data.  Is there any solution?  Of course not.  But there is awareness.  And once you have awareness, you can set your own personal boundaries.

And then it’s our job as users to make sure that even if the sites change their own boundaries, that it affects us less than it could have because of the personal boundaries we put around not sharing our information.

So, what do you think?  Is there any point in trying to hold onto a shred of privacy in a world that is somewhat determined to ensure that we have no privacy?

Photo Credit: Jef Nickerson via Flickr

Updated at the Bottom

Okay, so continuing yesterday’s dissection of various social media platform’s terms of service (TOS), a bunch of questions or comments came up about Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest (or really, pick your social media platform — they all have similar TOS) that I’m going to attempt to answer.

Before we begin, I want to preface this by saying I use other social media platforms.  I think they’re wonderful tools of communication.  I just use them with this knowledge in the back of my head, and it colours the decisions I make about what I post.  But I just want that clear: I do post on Twitter, Facebook, et al.

So now let’s talk content since we discussed images and video yesterday.

Go back to the TOS samples I posted yesterday.  You are granting the same rights to your words whenever you post words on those sites.  So that totally amusing, pithy saying you came up with?  They can use that.  The tag line you have for your blog that you also post as the tagline to your Twitter account?  They can use that.  That clever slogan you came up with for Jif peanut butter while you were joking around with your friends?  They have the right to sub-license that slogan to Jif, collect the money for it, and not pass any of that money on to you (royalty free!).

Now, do I believe that this is likely to happen to you?  No, but it could happen to you.  So you just need to know that in order to set your comfort zone.  And again, this is about giving permission.

You still own your content, which means that YOU can also take your pithy statement and slap it on a t-shirt.  It means that by granting them these rights, that you are not losing your rights.  And that’s all well and good.  But you’ve also given any of these sites the right to use your content in that manner as well.  If you are comfortable with that possibility (and I am often comfortable with that possibility in the same way that I am often comfortable posting pictures of myself but not others), you should post that content.  If you are not comfortable with that possibility, you should post it elsewhere or not post it at all.

Which brings us to two different topics that meet at a central point: protecting your content.

If you read those TOS (and the TOS of pretty much any social media site), they have the right to close your account without warning.  Unlike a self-hosted blog that you pay for, free sites are allowed to wipe away your work.  Therefore, if you care about that content a lot, I would keep a copy.  It’s easiest on Twitter: just use a service such as All My Tweets to see them on one page, and then cut-and-paste a copy onto a Word doc.  Simple.  It’s also pretty easy on Facebook.  You can follow their instructions on downloading your content.  I am less familiar with how to do this on other sites, or whether the possibility exists.  When I post on sites other than my own, I always save a copy of my post as a Word doc.  I would lose the comments and such if they chose to delete my work, but at least I would have my thoughts.

The other side of protecting your content is investing yourself in sites that are under your control.  It doesn’t fit my personality nor my preferences on the Internet to invest a lot of energy into building huge followings on Twitter.  Twitter is lovely, but it’s also outside of my control.  They can decide tomorrow to erase my account and all of my followers are gone.  Same with Facebook.  Which freaks me out a little bit.

The same goes for free Blogger and WordPress accounts.  I think most people should start with a free account to see if they enjoy blogging.  But once they’ve determined that they do enjoy blogging and they plan to keep going with it indefinitely, they should switch to a self-hosted account if they can afford to do so.  Again, this only matters if you feel strongly about your content.  Some people look at their blog as they do a sandcastle — something fun to build or beautiful in the moment, but if it washes away, they’re okay with that too.  Other people look at their blog as something more akin to a concrete statue and they want a promise that it will be there in the future.  Self-hosting does that.

In between are the people who don’t need it to be concrete but would be sad if it washed away, and those people should simply do a poor man’s blog backup continuously — you will always have your content, but you can release your fears of losing your space.  Because the possibility of losing your space is built into the TOS as well.

There is two things we’re talking about here: (1) permanence and (2) rights.  The permanence part is clear: if you self-host, you control your space.  As long as you continue to pay for it and you don’t trespass on your host’s TOS, you have your space.  The same is not true for free WordPress or Blogger sites nor for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest accounts.  You own the content, meaning, you hold the rights to it.  If you want to publish it in a book, you can.  If you want to create photocopies of it, you can.  But THEY own the site, the space online.  And they graciously give it to you for free.

So I think the important thing to think about is whether you are more of a sandcastle person or a concrete sculpture person, or do you fall somewhere in between where you neither need the permanence of concrete but you don’t love the impermanence of sand?  And in knowing that about yourself, are you making choices on the Internet that fit your preferences?

I know that I lean much more heavily towards concrete than sand — the numerous boxes in my storage room saving artifacts from childhood are a case in point — so self-hosting not only makes sense, but it is the best choice for me once I look at the TOS of various free blogging platforms.  I put my greatest efforts into my blog, and less of an effort into other social media platforms just because I like the amount of control and permanence the blog affords me.  It’s also about ownership: I like to own the words I like.  Which is to say that I also don’t mind placing my words elsewhere (comments, other social media platforms, even guest blogging), but I am picky about which words I give to others and which ones I keep for myself in terms of giving away the rights of usage.  I don’t expect other social media platforms will use my words, but I also don’t want to give them permission to do so.

Are you more of a sand person, a concrete person, or — like me — do you fall somewhere in between while leaning more towards one end than the other?  And more importantly, do your choices online reflect those preferences right now?

Photo Credit: Hendricks Photos via Flickr.

Updated:

If people are interested, I can write up a tutorial on how to move to self-hosting.  It’s not that difficult to do.  I sort of see it as an insurance policy for my blog rather than the ability to utilize all the cool things self-hosting includes (such as hosting sound files or video).

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This week I went into my settings to discover what Facebook knows about me.  90% of it is wrong.  I really felt like I was being trolled by Facebook; like it was showing me wrong information to tease me.  But it did figure out that I like video games.  I do.  I like video games very very very much.

Which is why it has hurt my heart that I’ve been playing fewer video games over the last few months.  I took on too many work contracts, which is excellent for our budget and terrible for my video game time.  I’m trying to be a grown up about it, but it’s hard because I’m not very mature.

Mostly I’m saving up all of my energy and video gaming time for Wizards Unite.  I refused to play Pokemon Go because I hated their terms of service, but I’m totally willing to hand over all my personal information to pretend to be a wizard.  I am so excited for this game.  Are you going to play?

*******

Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Baby Smiling in Back Seat has a post about being too scared to speak up about her infertility in the past.  She writes, “An opportunity had presented itself to educate a large group of people about infertility. The whys, the hows, the whos, all of it. A topic I knew better than almost any other. But it was too raw for me and I didn’t.”  There is more to this story than contained in the post, but it’s still food for thought: about expiration dates for talking about infertility (is there one?) and the topics we find we can’t speak about despite being experts due to life experience.

I adore The Road Less Travelled’s post about what she has learned from 10 years of blogging, which also inversely contains thoughts on getting through 10 years of living childless/childfree after loss and infertility without blogging.  It is a fantastic list, and it made my heart swell thinking about how much I love our little corner of the blogosphere.

Lastly, Something Out of Nothing has a post about her second pregnancy — another hard-fought pregnancy — and how it is different from the first time around.  It was interesting how it mirrors many of the statements made by women pregnant without assistance, but also the difference between how pregnancies are monitored in different parts of the world.

The roundup to the Roundup: Harry Potter augmented reality!  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 10th and 17th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.