I had a discussion with some of my colleagues about how social media / networking platforms should be allowed to mine all the information they want about their users. The argument was that if users really cared about their privacy, they would read the T&C of these platforms and pay attention to what they were giving up in exchange for the service. I tried to come up with what a simple and direct T&C list might look like... Here goes..
1. Our services are offered free of cost to you. Our services are usually fairly compelling and alternatives are hard to come by.
2. We will strive to get you to use our services as much as possible. The more you use our services, the harder it will be to migrate away.
3. We will collect, store and mine as much data as possible about you. We will come up with compelling new ways to get you to give us more data about you and your connections.
4. Some of the data will be used to make our services more relevant to you.
5. Most of the data we collect will be used to market stuff to you.
6. We will use the data we collect to collaborate with other platforms so they can sell you more stuff.
7. We will sell your data to third parties to allow them to target you with whatever products (or agendas) they chose.
This should be simple enough to present to users, and may be make them answer a short quiz about this list before they are allowed to use the service? That would definitely increase the friction for new users to use the service, at least they would know what to expect from the service!
I get the irony of publishing this list on Blogger, a free service I traded my data for. Ughh...
