Documentary review: Terms and Conditions May Apply

Our digital rights: Encroached and abused, systematically

With the recent discourse surrounding the Internet Slowdown Day, it has perhaps become even more relevant now than before to really understand how our digital rights are hijacked. This topic is explored in detail by Hoback in his groundbreaking documentary ‘Terms and Conditions May Apply’. Remarkably, none of us reads the terms and conditions associated with every app, movie or music we download or every account we make on an email or a social network. Why? Because these terms and conditions are almost a hundred pages long and no one in the world has time to read that much information.

And yet we are willing to give so much of our private information to the government and to private agencies, information that we would never even reveal to our most intimate friend. Moreover, this information is misused, Hoback says, by the government and spy agencies, to hunt down innocent people. So the next time you hear someone being detained because of a tweet, or someone being killed because of a search term he used on Google, just don’t be surprised. Technology companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Apple etc give their user data to third parties like the government and the NSA, who then use it for mass surveillance and information censorship. So a YouTube video that goes against a government measure gets banned, a Tweeter that exposes any human rights violation of a state gets jailed, a blogger who leaks any information that gets the authorities in trouble, gets abducted.

Technology companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Apple etc give their user data to third parties like the government and the NSA, who then use it for mass surveillance and information censorship

Talks about transparency in the government are futile, especially when you have organisations like WikiLeaks getting banned and its founder Julian Assange living in exile, for trying to make the government more transparent. In a country where citizen journalism receives such bashing, how can freedom of speech truly ever flourish?

Just as the Internet has become a global phenomenon, just like that mass surveillance and Internet censorship has too. So, Pakistan is not immune from such problems too. Talk about YouTube being banned, with Facebook receiving regular threats. Nevertheless, this documentary serves as a timely reminder to reclaim our digital rights and fight back for our privacy. After all do we really agree to the terms and conditions that apply?