Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Legal, Policies, and Ethics

“By clicking Accept, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.” Does anyone actually read all of the regulations and policies before accepting? Not really. The Guardian actually did a study to find out just how many people in all of Great Britain actually read the fine print; the survey revealed that ONLY 7% of Britons read online terms and conditions when signing up for products and services! That is a pretty small amount of people, especially considering how popular social media is. So, why don’t we read the fine print to make sure we’re not accepting something we don’t agree with? Well…we’re lazy. The Terms and Conditions takes FOREVER to read through and uses words that we don’t really understand. Although, it is super annoying to have to read all of the policies presented by a company, it’s actually really important to at least familiarize yourself with what exactly you are agreeing to.

Snapchat is an extremely popular social networking app, especially among the younger demographic. The reason that the younger generation loves it so much is because of the feature that allows users to take photos that disappear after the receiver has viewed it. This has probably made parents a little more uneasy than other social networking platforms considering they can’t look through their child’s phone to make sure that they aren’t sending anything inappropriate.  

So, why is everyone freaking out about Snapchat lately? Well, Marketwatch explains that Snapchat’s updated privacy policy has claimed the rights to reproduce, modify, and republish photos and save them to Snapchat’s servers, specifically in relation to the ‘Live Story’ feature.  So yeah, all of the people who have sent pictures that definitely don’t want any chance to be resurfaced are freaking out about Snapchat’s violation of their privacy. But hey, Snapchat didn’t technically do anything wrong; all of its users agreed to it.


So, next time one of your apps, products, or services tells you “By clicking Accept, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy,” you might want to read into what you are agreeing to.  


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