Bah, who reads that drivel? C'mon just hurry up and open the box and lets play with that new gadget.
There's a hilarious episode of South Park you can watch sometime if you ever wondered what might be hiding in those consent forms entitled " HUMANCENTiPAD " in which one of the South Park kids, Kyle, is chased through the town and kidnapped by Apple employees, who claim their actions are legal under the newest version of the iTunes terms and conditions, which Kyle agreed to without reading.
He is thrown into a prison cell with a Japanese man and a Caucasian woman. Then, at a gathering of Apple employees, Steve Jobs unveils the new product for which Kyle and the other two were kidnapped, the HUMANCENTiPAD, comprised of the three kidnapped subjects on all fours, wearing only white cloths around their waists and sewn together mouth to anus. The Japanese man is in front, with an iPhone attached to his forehead; Kyle is in the middle; and the Caucasian woman is at the rear, with an iPad attached to her anus and powered by the trio's feces. Jobs intends to teach the creation to read and walk, but is disappointed when Kyle continues to sign agreements that are put in front of him without reading them first.
While satire, the show does make a serious point. These tiny check-boxes placed in front of access to any reasonable and seemingly innocuous convenience we consume are concealing something important and if you every wondered what might be in there, well, lets just say there's plenty of room to hide the HUMANCENTiPAD.
How much room, you ask?
Well, in a recent experiment featured on this mornings TED Radio Hour, a woman was interviewed who decided the best way to illustrate how this very human tendency, to overlook a detail to get at the goodies, has created a great hiding place to stash every conceivable concern we should have before playing with anything in the never ending parade of new toys and gadgets. She took a typical terms and conditions document from her cell phone AND ACTUALLY READ IT, online, in a pod cast! Before doing that however she printed it out.
IT WAS OVER 4900 PAGES LONG!
How long did it take to read?
39 HOURS AND 50 MINUTES!
(That's about the same amount of time as watching the entire Godfather trilogy and every Harry Potter movie in a single marathon.)
But for those readers not confined to a quadriplegic wheelchair here's one link I clicked doing research for this post for a briefer rundown of things you might want to know:
https://www.privacyrights.org/consumer-guides/smartphone-privacy
Did I read it all? Pfft... Nah.
It's mind numbing stuff. But so is state sponsored mandatory electro-shock therapy, so maybe I ought to quit being so willfully gullible. You know, if we all did and instead of giving away our personal information just to see whats in every random mystery box we could easily begin demanding cash for our information . Just imagine what the effects of that be... What if the new normal for software developer applications was a business model where in order to succeed they would either have to figure out how to compete based on much they could afford to afford to pay you for using their product or make it cool enough you would ALLOW use of SOME of your data in exchange for it. I bet that would make software bugs extinct pretty fast. I'd go so far as to call it 'RAID' for software.
And the new standard checkbox COULD read:
√ I have read the "Terms and Conditions" and agree to a weekly deposit of $50 into my bank account.
There's a hilarious episode of South Park you can watch sometime if you ever wondered what might be hiding in those consent forms entitled " HUMANCENTiPAD " in which one of the South Park kids, Kyle, is chased through the town and kidnapped by Apple employees, who claim their actions are legal under the newest version of the iTunes terms and conditions, which Kyle agreed to without reading.
He is thrown into a prison cell with a Japanese man and a Caucasian woman. Then, at a gathering of Apple employees, Steve Jobs unveils the new product for which Kyle and the other two were kidnapped, the HUMANCENTiPAD, comprised of the three kidnapped subjects on all fours, wearing only white cloths around their waists and sewn together mouth to anus. The Japanese man is in front, with an iPhone attached to his forehead; Kyle is in the middle; and the Caucasian woman is at the rear, with an iPad attached to her anus and powered by the trio's feces. Jobs intends to teach the creation to read and walk, but is disappointed when Kyle continues to sign agreements that are put in front of him without reading them first.
While satire, the show does make a serious point. These tiny check-boxes placed in front of access to any reasonable and seemingly innocuous convenience we consume are concealing something important and if you every wondered what might be in there, well, lets just say there's plenty of room to hide the HUMANCENTiPAD.
How much room, you ask?
Well, in a recent experiment featured on this mornings TED Radio Hour, a woman was interviewed who decided the best way to illustrate how this very human tendency, to overlook a detail to get at the goodies, has created a great hiding place to stash every conceivable concern we should have before playing with anything in the never ending parade of new toys and gadgets. She took a typical terms and conditions document from her cell phone AND ACTUALLY READ IT, online, in a pod cast! Before doing that however she printed it out.
IT WAS OVER 4900 PAGES LONG!
How long did it take to read?
39 HOURS AND 50 MINUTES!
(That's about the same amount of time as watching the entire Godfather trilogy and every Harry Potter movie in a single marathon.)
But for those readers not confined to a quadriplegic wheelchair here's one link I clicked doing research for this post for a briefer rundown of things you might want to know:
https://www.privacyrights.org/consumer-guides/smartphone-privacy
Did I read it all? Pfft... Nah.
It's mind numbing stuff. But so is state sponsored mandatory electro-shock therapy, so maybe I ought to quit being so willfully gullible. You know, if we all did and instead of giving away our personal information just to see whats in every random mystery box we could easily begin demanding cash for our information . Just imagine what the effects of that be... What if the new normal for software developer applications was a business model where in order to succeed they would either have to figure out how to compete based on much they could afford to afford to pay you for using their product or make it cool enough you would ALLOW use of SOME of your data in exchange for it. I bet that would make software bugs extinct pretty fast. I'd go so far as to call it 'RAID' for software.
And the new standard checkbox COULD read:
√ I have read the "Terms and Conditions" and agree to a weekly deposit of $50 into my bank account.
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