This documentary hooked me in from the very beginning with the eery montage of people accepting terms and conditions on the computer with strange music playing in the background. From the get go, they established how much of a threat these terms and conditions have become, stating that it would take 180 hours a year for you to read every term & condition you sign up for. Which wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t include anything harmful, but they do. The most astonishing one discovered in this documentary is the fact that Instagram owns all the right to photos posted on it. However, after doing some digging, Instagram’s policy on this has now changed: http://www.copyrightlaws.com/creators/instagram-and-copyright-what-are-the-terms-of-use/.
I have been incredibly interested in internet anonymity ever since the whole Edward Snowden vs. the NSA stuff in late 2012. Like a lot of americans, it opened my eyes to what the government really is up to, as that was all you saw on the internet and tv for weeks. The really interesting part, was the mainstream media wasn’t quite sure how to handle it. CNN and Fox News weren’t sure whether or not to label him a hero or a traitor. Luckily, I am an avid reader of Reddit, so I was able to get an unbiased view of what was happening.
Anyways, the whole NSA whistleblowing revealed to me, just like this documentary reinforced, that all Internet privacy laws really went out the window as soon as the Patriot Act was put into place. There was some things that were new to me from this documentary that I previously didn’t know about. I knew that companies like Facebook sells your info to other companies, but the ad networking flow chart displayed in the film was astonishing. The fact that that many different companies have information on me is terrifying.
More terrifying than all of that is not that companies have my info, but the government does and uses it to their advantage. All the examples in the movie, from the police in the Netherlands using GPS info for speed traps, the Cold Case writer mis taken for a murderer, the kid who was questioned at school by Secret Service for a dumb Facebook post, and the man who quoted a movie on Facebook and got the SWAT team called on him were all flat out disturbing. The worst part is that there’s all these examples, and so many whistle blowers and still NOTHING gets done to change what is happening. I was hoping this documentary at the end would bring a call to action, but instead ended with just a website, trackoff.us. It’s just about how to protect yourself on the internet, not how to protect everyone else. Hopefully Mark Zuckerberg ended up watching the documentary, and as he was asking not to be recorded, he will start to respect our anonymity and not record us. He won’t though, and neither will all of the big companies, and that’s why there is no call to action in this documentary. Money rules the world, and until that stops happening, nothing will be done to protect the citizens of the world.