Listen Here
This was a project for one of my undergraduate courses, which asked for us to produce a podcast about a topic of our choosing from beginning to end. Initially, this was my chance to use my existing audio production skills, and improve on my individual production mechanics. I wanted to cover a technology policy issue I thought was deeply relevant in modern social discourse, and I wanted to promote digital tools, hearkening back to my independent work with collecting links and resources for myself and my peers. Both of these tools were ones I was extremely familiar with when I went into production.
I was deeply inspired by podcasts of older origin with design and approach, but I was inspired by both my traditional broadcast radio work and podcasts like Tech Will Not Save Us, and If Books Could Kill.
I wanted to present a informational but still personable approach to a complex topic that required multiple areas of understanding to communicate. By pointing to tools to further explore privacy focused information, I allow my audience to do their own exploration, along with my link library, my sources that guided my research and commentary are clear.
Had I done anything differently, I would give my scripting and presentation a bit of a more relaxed feel. Since my background is in broadcast news, I found my reading a little intense at times because I was fighting the tinny sound of AM radio. For my aesthetic choices, I would also make my music stingers softer, as I created them myself using Freesound loops and clips, I could have done a better job, but sound mixing for music isn’t my specificity, and I do have a love for noise music. I thought my design for the podcast cover was quite cute! Though I thing the contrast is a bit of a nightmare, and I would like fix that accessibility issue.
Project Link Library
Text Script
If you’re spending your entire life with something, shouldn’t it make you happy? Shouldn’t it make your life better?
Out of everything we interact with in our day to day, the digital demand on our consciousness is higher than ever. At home, at work, in the car, at the store. Your digital identity is vast and in demand, your data is a gold mine, not for you, but for companies across industries that hope to make money off of you, or make money advertising to you.
More and more, to interact with the internet, or even basic services, you are asked to digitally sign away your rights and protections with little to no knowledge of what that means until it’s too late.
Shouldn’t we have control of our lives and identities on the web?
Welcome, to A Better Web.
I’m Avery Martinez, I’m an Senior undergraduate, with focus on professional and technical writing, journalism and digital production. In A Better Web, I intend to explore the collapsing state of current web environments and the harm an unregulated commercial web has caused over the last decade. ‘m also here to talk about alternatives to the standard systems, tools and protocols that you can use in your digital life. While my area of work and study is heavily involved in the technical, my goal is to give you practical information you can use when interacting with the internet. If you’re asking what’s the problem with the modern internet,
I think it’s important to evaluate just how intertwined the internet and digital policy is in your daily life.
Lets say, start your day, run through the steps. Count in your head how many times you interact with a device that communicates or relies on the internet. You likely interact with personal devices, your computer and phone. You surely have to pay for things, using a debit or credit card. You’re asked at work to sign up for an app or give out your number so communication for your shifts can happen. You open Instagram, and the ads are a little *too* personalized. For every willful occurrence of digital access, your video watching, your app use, giving your email to something you signed up for, there is a world of secondary digital interactions you have little to no control or say over, exchanges of data, abandoning your rights, and being monitored for capitalistic and surveillance gains.
This isn’t hyperbole, in the last decade, hundreds of examples American citizens have faced prosecution and dealt with suffering at the hands of public and private data policies alike. Most recently, service terms in applications such as food delivery and streaming have stripped users of their legal rights to sue entire companies for negligence and death, in the case of a man who’s wife died in the Disney parks due to allergies who signed his rights away by signing up for a free Disney + trial, or uber passengers in a car accident who signed their rights away after getting a Uber Eats order. In the same vein, the government has utilized electronic data and surveillance to identify activists, to monitor marginalized groups, and most recently, prosecute and restrict healthcare choices. In the last four years alone, we’ve seen activists during the Black Lives Matter movement tracked through purchases on Etsy, a shop platform which willingly reports to the US. State governments cross the US, including Utah, Texas and Florida have launched “tip” lines to collect the personal information and actions of transgender adults and children.
Similar tip lines and surveillance systems were created in response to the dismissal of Roe v Wade, in which states with abortion restrictions attempt to track, punish and prosecute any women seeking an abortion or women who experience pregnancy complications via monitoring systems like search history and communications, and popular period tracking applications.
What does this mean in a society where using the internet is less of a choice, and more of a requirement?
First of all, a person needs to understand just how terms of service are laid out across private companies. Terms of Service agreements are present across digital services, used to be a bridge between service designers and audiences to communicate legal or disclaimer info. In the case of the Uber and Disney Plus cases highlighted earlier, their terms hold a common contract law precedent, arbitration, with the federal act dictating that the contract provisions “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.”
The moment you click “Agree.” in the eyes of the law, you are agreeing to not just attribution, but to numerous policies. To researchers and yourself alike, the real biggest lie on the internet is that you understand them. Instead of lying to yourself, and blindly agreeing to terms, there are other options. While one of the foundational rules of defensive computing can be to not engage with piece of digital software before you fully understand it, sometimes the expectation to engage is out of your control. What you can do instead is educate yourself, first on what terms of service policies can look like based on your concerns, then specifically for the services you’re considering.
Reject Convenience: Privacy Visualizer is a simple and newer tool to the scene provides a simple interface, an option to read about why it was created, and several buttons with different types of data captured in terms of service, clicking on one, you get a definition based explainer of what is being captured, the benefits and downsides to the capture of this data, and terms typically used to find that data.
With this tool, you get a broader scope of exactly what information digital services want from you. Consider clicking “Health, Sensitive Info, and Identity” to see how these means of data collection dig into your personal life, and ask yourself how many companies you’d signed off on to analyze and store this data. Once you understand what forms of data are up for grab, the robust Terms of Service Didn’t Read services are your one stop shop to lay out the policies, the amount of data they want, and how invasive or harmful these policies are to you as the user.
A visit to the site provides a long look at every app or site you could think of. Facebook glows a bright red with an even redder E grade, one of the worst reviews you could get, it details everything from evasiveness with advertising, the consumption of your data without even having a Facebook account, and deleted content Meta, Facebook’s parent company, never truly deletes. This is one of the thousands of evaluations on Didn’t Read, and you can easily search them to read about anything you sign up for. If you’re concerned about not remembering to check, they offer extensions for nearly every updated major browser, which shows a popup detailing the terms for you the second you visit a new site.
An exercise that may shock you is to search every app you have on your phone against Didn’t Read’s database, to understand just how many rights you’ve given up. By giving yourself the means to intake digital literacy for these documents, you’re already putting yourself ahead of the curve a large part of the digital user economy. The great thing about Terms of Service Didn’t Read in particular is it can highlight equitable and privacy considerate services in nearly every industry you can think of, making switches can protect you and make your experiences online easier.
Divorcing myself of services provided by Meta, for example, lessened the sheer volume of invasive personalized ads. For some, this can mean just one less annoyance, but for others it can mean life and death. In the case of data harvesting, pregnant people have become one of the richest sources of data both for companies hoping to advertise to them, and to regulators and private actors attempting to monitor whether someone has miscarried, or had an abortion. Despite legal arguments that this surveillance breaks constitutional rights against search and seizure, the courts aren’t exactly settled on this either.
The legality for data harvesting and ongoing contract terms in digital services is wrought with disagreement and conflict. On Uber’s use of arbitration, the first and second circuit courts weighed the legitimacy of these terms in two separate cases. Much of what gets debated is not the clauses in the terms themselves, but the way they are presented in a user interface context. The cases from the courts out of Massachusetts and California Respectively evaluated the screens plaintiffs say when inputting card info, displaying the terms of service.
The courts assume within their analysis that they are acting as an average user, determining what mechanisms Uber uses to show that the Terms of Service and if they are clear. In the California case, Uber’s design had a blue hyperlink which meant is was clear, while in the Massachusetts case the link was not in hypertext, or prominent enough to be acceptable. What you’re probably realizing at this point is that Uber has the power to change the presentation and access of their terms at will, while the policies that harm people stay the same.
While as it stands, there is no concrete way to protect yourself with existing terms of service you may be attached to, you do have legal protections in relation to data privacy laws that can invalidate agreed to policies if they fall out of line. Though the market has made terms of service policies exist everywhere online, encouraging both individual and communal agency in the decision making surrounding signing up for something can and will protect people.
Making the switch to privacy focused tools by evaluating your options on sites like Terms of Service didn’t read can mean the difference when your data and privacy is on the line. Talking about these issues and giving easy, accessible solutions is only the start of a broad list of choices you and those around you can present in personal and professional contexts so the risk of agreeing to the hyped software of the week can be clear. By refusing predatory services, educating yourself on the data you hold within your digital identity, and how to keep your identity safe, you are securing a future on the internet without the invasion of privacy and legal pressure you are unwillingly put under every time you go online. You are taking the first step in a long line of digital infrastructure adaptions and changes to day to day practices. By putting the time in considering just what you’re signing up for, you are making educated choices and reasoning with what you are truly comfortable doing with your data.
You are taking your first steps into a Better Web.
For more information about the research for this piece, links to the discussed tools, and links to all secondary sounds used in the production of this podcast, visit the attached script and citation page. A Better Web was produced by Avery Martinez for “Digital Storytelling and Culture” at the University of Arizona under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, for more information on Avery’s work, visit dyingsignals.love
