[mrguyorama]

So now average users are expected to be able to interpret adversarial-y written EULAs? If Joe Nobody should be able to disentangle a web of lawyer jingo and ass covering from what may very well be a team of lawyers with combined decades of experience, then why do we even have lawyers in the world?

[fasj82]

It's not an adversarial-y written EULA, it's something like this

https://img.ientry.com/webpronews/article_pics/facebook-perm...

If you can't read and understand that I'm sure you can collect disability checks from the government

[JackCh]

>If you can't read and understand that I'm sure you can collect disability checks from the government

When it comes to computers there is a WIDE divide between can't read and doesn't read. I'm sure nearly every person in tech has at some point in their life had an encounter with a non-technical user who, given an error message that clearly states the problem, has selective blindness and doesn't read the error message but rather just clicks 'okay' and can't figure out what the problem was. They could read the error message but have effectively been trained not to.

Similarly facebook users could read that message detailing how their privacy is about to be violated, but have probably been trained not to care.

[FridgeSeal]

> but have probably been trained not to care.

I'm of the opinion that this is definitely something that has occurred and it has been done very, very deliberately. The media and ad industry and companies like fb work(ed) very hard to encourage people that:

* they should give up privacy in return for (carefully metered out dopamine hits) shiny things.

* they should give up more data and privacy because they've given up x much already

* They've given up all this stuff, fb/et etc already knows everything so they don't have any privacy so why bother protecting stuff _now_

* They gave up all this stuff and look, nothing bad has happened, so if you want privacy, you must be hiding something/a terrorist/a paedophile/etc.

And thus we arrive where we are now. Trying to convince people to take back some privacy and control to un-fuck the whole situation is an uphill battle, because those whose interests are in retaining control and lack of privacy are very well resourced and have gone to great effort to hide negative effects from the users and convince them of their non-existence.

[rhizome]

How do you think the typical user defines the word, "access," there?

[JackCh]

Log into? The 'typical user" interpretation of what "access" means in this context is probably worse than what was actually done. "Access" isn't a word that sounds innocent, if the app told them it was going to "'access' their bank account" any user who actually took the time to read it instead of blindly clicking through certainly would have second thoughts to say the least.

The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that facebook users using these kind of quiz apps simply didn't care about privacy. When presented with that dialog they shrug and clicked through. Privacy was something they didn't take seriously at the time, if ever. The two big fuckups by facebook, imho, are:

1) Allowing such privacy invasion, knowing that foolish users would fall for it. They should have protected their users by forbidding this sort of thing in the first place even if their users were too foolish to desire such protection.

2) Allowing careless users to give away information about their friends, many of whom would have avoided such "quiz apps" but got sucked up by the apps because of their careless friends.

[saint_fiasco]

It doesn't take much skill to read lawyer lingo. The hard part is writing it, and that's why lawyers make money doing that.

It's the same for any language. For example I can read French and Portuguese but I can't write them. Also I can read very fancy English texts but my writing is very basic.