Typical TOS Clauses

Takeaway Points Using online services, grants those services rights to inspect, read, replay, perform, copy, sub-license, monetize, and store YOUR intellectual property, anywhere in the world, subject to laws in other countries. That should be chilling to any media/content producer. While still reasonably unlikely, consider some edge cases here. There are slight variations in legal language, but you are granting copyrights to your service providers.…

What you agreed to

User Generated Content A new source of monetizable renewable raw material is called User Generated Content or UGC. This is an excerpt from YouTube’s TOS, same as Google, Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Any variations are small, the substance remains the same from provider to provider: … by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to…

Kiddie Korner

Collecting data about children under the age of 13 without parental consent is against the law — but that law isn’t very well enforced. More than two-thirds of the 1,000 most popular iPhone apps likely to be used by children send data to the ad industry, according to a recent study. Are iPhones spying on kids? Do Not Track Kids, made by an ex-National Security…

What is Privacy?

Default control over your data, is privacy. Your personal metrics, financial data, geographic data, biometric data, and data that you generate, should be considered private. In most terms of service that you have agreed to, there is egregious overreach in their interpretation of data ownership, claiming nearly complete copyrights over anything you transmit over their network. “Private” means the default amount of information you give…

Social Media Fraud

coming soon – primary source research showing how Facebook/Instagram charges customers for advertising to unqualified target audiences. Evidence is presented. Conclusions are drawn. Analysis by industry insiders regarding how these techniques could be be applied and estimated value of fraud are made. This should be fun.

What is Software?

By definition, Software gets between you and what you want. Originally, software was a tool to accomplish a task. However, once the internet was commercialized, software became a way to funnel users into creating and giving up information. The invention of the “smartphone”, basically the iPhone, and the rise in popularity of Facebook are the key inflection points when hardware (phones) and software (apps) shifted…

Cryptocurrency

Incomprehensibility is a feature The complexity of cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFT’s, is a wonderful way to confuse people. When people are confused by technology, they look for service providers to reduce that cognitive load and do the work for them for a “small fee”. Fortunately, there is someone to take your money, the crypto exchanges. Read this excerpt from Coindesk.com, and ask yourself what it means.…

Regular Juice

Here’s the rest of the Juice on data malfeasance. Essentially, data gathering is a business model that approximately 100% of commercial software developers, social media, and network service providers have adopted. 2022.10.12. Amazon smart home products, Ring doorbell, Alexa smart speaker/assistant, etc, allow Amazon to create a detailed psychological profile of all aspects of your life. They know when you go to the bathroom. They…

Apple Juice

Apple advertises extensively that they protect your privacy. Quite a few people seem to believe it. Draw your own conclusions. 2022.11.14 Lawsuit accuses Apple of violating the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The problem was spotted by independent researchers, who found that the Apple App Store sends the company exhaustive information about nearly everything a user does in the app, despite the privacy setting “disable…