Terms of Service

After reading the article, “The Invasion of the cookie monsters” by Jack Shafer I realized how much privacy we give up when we use the internet. Our personal information is constantly being tracked online. Although, what surprised me the most was that we sometimes give up our privacy when we agree to the terms of service of many online sites. Shafer says, “If we were to read the voluminous ‘terms of service’ … We’d see that the providers of ‘free’ services were very candid about how they’d use our personal information” (91). In other words, we give up our privacy when we sign up to use free services such as Gmail or Facebook. In my opinion, the terms of service is a clever way of tricking us into agreeing to give up our privacy without us really wanting to. I say this because if you think about it no one really reads the terms of service. Most people just click yes, and continue on to the next step when they are signing up for an email account, or creating a profile page on a social network site. In the end, reading this article made me realize how much privacy is taken away when we use the internet.