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posted by martyb on Monday February 25 2019, @04:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the What-do-you-read,-my-lord?-Words,-words,-words. dept.

We should each take privacy seriously, even online, and there is a distinction between privacy and security. The latter is a choice, the former is a right. Despite that it is not feasible for most people to read the terms and conditions for the online services which they use, especially when these terms of service weigh in with multiple tens of thousands of words per document.

Private text messages aside, who really cares about data privacy, right? If your photos, contacts, calendar, email, browsing history, search history, musical tastes, files, thousands of status updates, likes, shares and physical movements are all in the cloud, who really cares?

Please read that last paragraph again and let it sink in – that is probably more data than your nearest and dearest have about you. Yet generally speaking, people don’t seem to be concerned that such volumes of data are out there and being used without our consent.

PayPal’s terms and conditions are longer than Hamlet! The vast majority of people will not have the time, or inclination, to read and decipher thousands of words in legalese to work out where their data is going. Ipso facto, this data is being shared without our consent, regardless of whether we have accepted the terms and conditions or not.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 25 2019, @05:02PM (6 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 25 2019, @05:02PM (#806397) Homepage Journal

    They're probably also harder to mentally translate to ordinary, modern English too.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @05:20PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @05:20PM (#806409)

    Another commonality: The main character (Hamlet in the case of Shakespeare, Privacy in the case of PayPal) doesn't survive.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @06:16PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @06:16PM (#806470)

      And just like Hamlet, privacy killed itself.

      Paypal is no Brutus! They killed nobody

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:31AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2019, @07:31AM (#806846)

        "The tip, unbated and envenomed!"

        About says it all, Peter Thiel wise? (Give me your young blood!)
        (Do not expect TMB to understand this, as Shakespeare did not write in English.)

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:38PM

      by Fnord666 (652) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @01:38PM (#806900) Homepage

      Another commonality: The main character (Hamlet in the case of Shakespeare, Privacy in the case of PayPal) doesn't survive.

      Spoiler alert!

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:48AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @03:48AM (#806765)

    No, they aren't hard to translate at all: "We, PayPal, can do whatever we want to with both any money that is really supposed to be yours but is in our possession, and any data about you we've collected. You, the user, have no right to sue us for doing so."

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by jb on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:49AM

    by jb (338) on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:49AM (#806810)

    They're probably also harder to mentally translate to ordinary, modern English too.

    ...and far less enjoyable to read.

    I propose an alternate rule:

    Contracts can be as long as you want, but if they exceed some arbitrary limit on length (say, 640 characters?), they must be written in the form of a play, at least to the standard of Shakespeare (and notarised as such by a recognised literary critic).

    That should both encourage the lawyers to write shorter contracts and encourage the average man to take the time to read any remaining long ones.