Max Schrems is telling you to watch out.
Earlier this year The New York Times reported Max’s ongoing battle with Facebook. It seems that after two or three years of using the social networking page, the Austrian law student suddenly sat up and said, “Hmm,” and began thinking about his personal data. What kind of information was Facebook keeping on him? And, for that matter, what was the company doing with it?
So the 24-year-old Max started asking questions and finally had to file a legal grievance to get a copy of everything that Facebook had on him. Lo and behold, the company sent him a disc containing 1,222 pages of information. The Facebook folks were routinely collecting data that he didn’t think he ever consented to give them—such as his physical location and tons of stuff that he had long ago deleted from the site.
That might sound like a random little anecdote that doesn’t have much to do with you. But if it even makes you pause for just a second to think about your own Facebook stockpile, you probably need to think a little bigger. What about all the other sites you visit during your Internet surfing? Let me ask you, have you ever actually stopped to read any of the privacy policies from sites that asked you to click “I agree” before you ventured in? Probably not.
Researchers Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor put together a little study called “The Price of Reading Privacy Policies” that pointed out how people rarely ever read the online policies, mainly because they’re so ridiculously dense and cumbersome.
In fact, if you check out their paper here you’ll see that McDonald and Cranor estimated that to actually read all those pages of stuff that we instantly click through, it would take everyone about 244 working hours per year. That’s just a hair over 30 work days—or one month out of every 12 just reading lawyereeze. They also estimated that if you extrapolated that out to the whole nation in terms of total cost—in time alone—it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $781 billion a year.
On the other hand, since we’re not reading all that stuff, we really don’t know what kind of permissions we’ve handed over, do we?
Here’s what Cranor told NPR recently:
When you go into a shopping mall, there's nobody following you around," Lorrie Faith Cranor said in an NPR article. "Imagine that as you go around your shopping mall, you have someone who is not only looking and commenting—but actually recording everything that you look at, every time you hesitate, every time you remark about something. And then, after you leave the shopping mall, and you go to your dentist's office, you go to the doctor's, you go to pick your kids up from school, they continue to follow you around, and everything is being recorded. I think that is what you have on the Internet.
Almost makes you think Max is on to something, doesn’t it?
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