What’s really in online terms of service that we agree to? Nate Beard joins Sheana to talk about where these terms of service come from and what’s in them. Find out what rights we may be sacrificing while using social media platforms in this episode of the Innovation For All Podcast.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What’s in Terms of Service and do we really understand them?
• Problems that come with terms of service on social media
• Ethics of Terms of Service
• How restrictive are terms of service?
• What rights are affected by TOS?
• Speech on social media platforms
• Privacy,  ownership, and due process on social media platforms
• Ways forward with Terms of Service

Links and People Mentioned

• Powtoon
• Dr. Casey Fiesler
  • Her article
• HighQ
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Aaron Swartz
• Danah Boyd
• Lawrence Lessig
• James Grimmelmann
• Frank Pasquale
• Danielle Citron
• Mastodon
• Nathan Schneider
• Trebor Scholz
• Jack Balkin
• Jonathan Zittrain

Other Resources from Nate

Terms of Service General info:

• User Agreements Are Betraying You. Woodrow Hertzog. https://medium.com/s/trustissues/user-agreements-are-betraying-you-19db7135441f
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Terms Of (Ab)Use: https://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse
• Usable Privacy Lab (Carnegie Mellon research group): https://www.usableprivacy.org/
• Terms and Conditions May Apply (documentary): http://tacma.net/
• Terms of service and human rights: an analysis of online platform contracts (Venturini et al.): http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/dspace/handle/10438/18231

IP/copyright:

• IP Primer: https://bit.ly/2IomxAG
• GNU Manifesto: https://bit.ly/1EPMaUE
• Guerrilla Manifesto: https://bit.ly/1z0wThz

Other Resources:

• TOS; Didn’t Read (browser plugin for rating TOS): https://tosdr.org/
• Polisis and Pribot (AI-powered plugin for evaluating privacy policies): https://pribot.org/
• ClickWrapped (TOS report cards): https://www.clickwrapped.com/
• Solutions moving forward
• Fighting Facebook, a Campaign for a People’s Terms of Service
• For technology designers and developers interested in getting involved in ethical technology solutions, Nate highly recommends Ben Green’s recent article: Data Science as Political Action: Grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1811/1811.03435.pdf
• Platform Cooperativism: 
  • Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy. Nathan Schneider
  • Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Edited by Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz.
  • https://platform.coop/about
  • http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/scholz_platformcoop_5.9.2016.pdf
• Towards Digital Constitutionalism? Mapping Attempts to Craft an Internet Bill of Rights: https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/99209
• Information fiduciaries:
  • http://www.techpolicy.com/Blog/Featured-Blog-Post/Jonathan-Zittrain-and-Jack-Balkin-Propose-Informat.aspx
  • https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/49/4/Lecture/49-4_Balkin.pdf
• Bigger issues underpinning TOS
• Danah boyd and Robyn Caplan. Who Controls the Public Sphere in an Era of Algorithms? Mediation, Automation, Power. https://datasociety.net/pubs/ap/MediationAutomationPower_2016.pdf
• Zeynep Tufekci. Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics. First Monday, Volume 19, 2014. http://firstmonday.org/article/view/4901/4097
• Surveillance capitalism: 
  • Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Shoshana Zuboff
  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are the pawns: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
  • Shoshana Zuboff at Data&Society:  (Note: starting at min 47:12 Dr. Zuboff talks about “solutions” and provides a good framework to think about moving forward in the face of seemingly gloomy/hopeless technological development.)

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