Prior to this assignment I never once thought about how Terms of Service affected me when I signed up or signed in to a website. It is actually mind blowing to find out that by not reading the Terms I was basically signing away all rights of how my information can be used.
Once I had read “Do you read Terms of Service Contracts?”, I realized that I was blindly agreeing to things that could come back to haunt me at a later date. Just like Greene in this article I would scroll down to where I could click agree because it takes way too long to read all of that legal jargon. The article said it would take an average user 40 minutes a day, which no one has 40 minutes to sit and read something we feel unnecessary and boring. After watching the video of the Social Experiment conducted by Inside Edition, I was basically stopped in my tracks when they said 1 out of 500 raised a concern about what was in the Terms of Service, during the experiment to see how many people would sign up to win a free iPad. The one person that did not sign up was because she did not have time to read the Terms of Service. This was definitely an eye opener because there was a first born clause that 98% of the people did not notice, and when she told them that they agreed to give the shirt off their backs, and a kidney, I thought, OMG, how many times have I done this in the past, but now I will no longer simply scroll to the bottom and click agree.
The Medium Terms of Service was also most enlightening because initially reading Rights and Ownership, one immediately think that when they said “you retain your rights to any content you submit, post, or display through their services”, you really do own what you wrote. Reading further, Medium states that once you have accepted their terms you are giving them a “nonexclusive, royalty free, worldwide, fully paid, sublicensable license to use, produce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, etc., now known or later developed content on their services”. So, this makes me aware that for every story I write and publish for my Digital Studies Class, after obtaining this knowledge, has to be completely well thought out. I must ensure that all subject matter submitted, or that will be submitted, has to be thoroughly vetted to guarantee that anything I write in my stories cannot be misinterpreted and used against me in the future.
