1. Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (TOS;DR)
“‘I have read and agree to the Terms’ is the biggest lie on the web,” contend the privacy advocates who run TOS;DR.
TOS;DR is a collaborative user rights initiative that functions to sift through, break down, rate and label various websites’ terms of use/service and privacy policies, which are often too cumbersome for the average person to read, yet also are equally important to understand. Your digital rights largely depend on what exactly is laid out in these policies.
Here's the good news: You can easily download TOS;DR's browser add-on to your browser of choice, so that when you visit a particular website (e.g., Facebook, Google, LinkedIn) a dropdown will appear that translates tangly legalese and lays out the good, bad, and neutral aspects of that site’s terms of use/service and privacy policy in a user-friendly manner.
See below for an example of what this might look like:
Write here...
Ghostery (For Consumers) provides a free consumer extension that shows you, in list form, all the digital trackers on a particular website and lets you make informed decisions about which one to block. Equipped with such an extension, you have the power to decide which companies to trust and which to block. Ghostery has the largest database of companies that are tracking you—more than 2,000, in fact. (Full disclosure, though: I use Google Analytics.)
I’ve had Ghostery for about a year(?) now, and I must say it’s been quite illuminating to see the dropdown that lists all the trackers various websites continuously employ to track consumer activity. In fact, I have found that you can roughly gauge a company’s overarching philosophies and attitudes towards consumer digital rights just by looking at the amount and type of trackers it uses.
Here's a list of company websites that use a varying number of trackers, ordered from least number of trackers to most.
- Wikipedia: 0
- Reddit: 2
- Amazon: 2
- Tumblr: 3
- LinkedIn (a company that has ruffled the features of the FTC in the past): 4
- Wall Street Journal: 4
- The New Yorker: 9
- Buzzfeed: 12
- The Economist: 15
- New York Post: 16
- Forbes: 17
- The Huffington Post: 18
- TMZ: 26
As you can imagine, Wikipedia and TMZ are poles apart in how each exploits available tracking services. (0 vs. 26)
uBlock Origin is a must-have browser extension, IMO. It’s easy on memory and CPU footprint, and yet can load and enforce thousands more filters than other popular blockers out there (e.g., AdBlock). I can attest to its usefulness; whenever I do turn it off, mostly out of curiosity, I immediately get the feeling that I have left a quiet mountain town and am now smack in the middle of Times Square.
As you can see, since installation, uBlock has blocked about 640,000 ads for me.
I hope you can see the so-called “Privacy Bargain” often alluded to by folks in this space doesn’t seem like much of a bargain.