Critique, supporting evidences and limitations of study

Advancement of information technology has made gathering and utilizing personal data easier for online organizations. However, some of the organization collect excessive data from their clients including their online day to day activities. The service providers use Big Data technology to collect, store and analyze the user information to improve their services (Eastin, Brinson, Doorey, and Wilcox, 2016, pp. 215). This has led to increase in clients concerns with regards to privacy and security; clients believe that their privacy and security is under serious threat.

For the online organizations, clients’ personal information has become an essential aspect of their economic asset and business model. On the side of the service provider, client’s personal information is collected, stored, processed and analyzed to get an additional value with the information without the client’s knowledge which is considered as data scam. The user totally have no control over the information once the information is disclosed. Despite the fact that the practices of the online service providers always get specified in form of terms and conditions, the documents are time consuming to read and their readability may be low, as a result, the clients do not really know what happen to their information if they engage in online services.

For a point of fact, the terms and condition are the only ways of gaining insight into various online organization practices with regards to their user’s personal information. Research, however, suggest that about 75% of terms and conditions are not read (Fiesler, Lampe, and Bruckman, 2016, pp. 1450-1461). The primary purpose of this article is to systematically analyze the systematic analysis of the terms and conditions as well as its visualization. The state of art presented in the following section suggest that there is need to develop a tool that will aid in enhancing privacy and security of personal information.

A normal critique concerning users’ privacy is that they care less for their privacy. Despite the available privacy enhancement techniques which have been made available for the users including terms and conditions for the online services as well as different studies available for the users to express their concerns for the privacy of their personal information, when they use system, these techniques and concern evaporate off their minds and they rarely use them (Eastin et al. 2016, pp. 216-217). This study is, however limited by the fact that various organizations which offer online services have technical terms in their terms and conditions which reduce the readability of the privacy policies. This has been the root cause of privacy and security concerns which have been expressed by users (Reidenberg, Bhatia, Breaux and Norton, 2016, pp. 1-29). However, users are blamed for being insensitive to the abuse of their personal information and ignorant for the risk they take by ignoring terms and conditions leading to privacy breach. The studies conducted by Thierer (2015, pp. 32) have also argue exactly for the same point.

Further, much more personal information is revealed by individuals themselves by virtue of association with others including friends and not online organization as have been in our mental attribution (Mehmood, Natgunanathan, Xiang, Hua, and Guo, 2016, pp. 1824). If I am not wrong, as at now almost everybody have a digital device that contains data about our environment, and that can provide information about its users to the environment. The individuals themselves disseminate their personal information in the social media or among the ecology devices. They talk loudly about themselves through these devices. For the most, others even reveal pictures of their own, visited location as well as planned activities on various devices to thousands of people. They further map out their social network revealing information about all their networks. In each of the previously mentioned case, it is clearly evident that it is not only online organizations that reveal personal information, rather users also participate in various kinds of horizontal and vertical data broadcast.

Critical analysis and differences in viewpoints

Various researchers view that the complexity and long-windedness of terms and conditions are the main reasons as to why a large percentage of consumers do not read them. As pointed out by (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018, pp. 1-20), two third of people do not often read terms and condition because they are too long and time consuming to read. The terms and conditions convey the information requirements on basis of the consumer rights and directives. The authors are absolutely right given the fact that some service providers normally put much more information in the terms and conditions which blur the line between the actual term and conditions, customer service as well as codes of conduct since they lack incentives to terms and conditions which are short and easy to read. These organizations want to reduce liability risks which may not be good on the side of consumers.

In the eyes of Li (2012, pp. 471-481), clients’ personal information has become an essential aspect of their economic asset and business model as they are collected, stored, processed and analyzed by companies. Li further states that organizations get an additional value with the information without the client’s knowledge, thus they should be blamed for privacy breach. This viewpoint, however differ from Mehmood et al. (2016, pp. 1825-1830) point of view as Mehmood and his team concede that clients are the root cause of privacy breaches due to their ignorance. The users do not read the terms of service while signing with organizations. Both sides are, however, right to some extent since the readability of some organizations’ terms and conditions are poor. Likewise, certain users assume terms of services while signing with organizations.

As perceived by various consumers, the cost of reading terms and conditions may give an impression to be high while their benefits may seem to be low (Eastin et al. 2016, pp. 216-217). For instance, the user may believe that no organization can provide bad terms and conditions because after all, the law will invalidate the bad terms and conditions to the consumer’s advantage, this mental make-up gives consumers an allusion that they cannot be cheated by their service providers. However this is true to certain extent, certain terms and conditions may stand the fairness test by the law. Therefore it does not necessarily means that terms and conditions are always favorable to users.

In the current state of art, multiple online organizations have lost trust from their consumers due to the data scam that have been discussed in the above sections of this article. A case example is Netflix. The Netflix is an online movie streaming service which allow its users to subscribe to watch movies. One advantage of the organization is that the recommendations for movies are based on its consumers’ watching history and ratings. Due to a significant and the improvised algorithms, the organization has increased its subscription manifold. However, this has raised the privacy concern among its users.  

The case example stated above generates the question: how will modern information technology favor privacy by the innovations that will help in protecting user’s privacy? Ideally, all ecosystem should take part in protecting users’ personal information. Nevertheless, users’ information are being broadcasted and re-used. It can be seen that data owners will face the consequences of threats to security and privacy of their personal information (Reidenberg et al. 2016, pp. 1-29).

Current state of art and limitation of study

Aside from the exceptional job of data collection and detailed analysis supporting various author’s perspectives, the study has one limitation with regard to the subject matter. It offers information on basis of secondary sources only.

This researched was based on the secondary sources. To gather data used in this research, a survey of articles was conducted on various scholarly sources including EndNote and google scholar. The key terms which were researched included “Readability of terms and conditions,” “online security and privacy breaches” among other titles relevant to the study. The articles were limited to peer reviewed scholarly articles, mainly reviews. Of all the articles that matched the subject of study, only seven articles were chosen since they were coherent with the research topic unlike the other articles that were omitted. The research was successfully conducted using this strategy and the selected articles were comprehensively reviewed according to the research topic.

EndNote and google scholar were the most preferred for this work due to the reason that they are useful as they helped a great deal in clarification of points as the chosen articles were reviewed. The articles chosen were limited to peer reviewed, the articles which have been reviewed and given a stamp of approval by experts in the subject domain, this was to ensure that this article is of high quality.

Conclusion:

At a glance, the current research conclude that with the increased data breaches, the responsibility of protecting online privacy has been left for the user who is expected to read the terms and conditions which are presented to them and decide on how they should respond to them (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018, pp. 1-20).  On the off chance that the users does not agree to the terms and conditions but have no option other than signing or they sign without reading the text, they are left to use the technological means to secure their personal information, otherwise, they must face the consequences of being ignorant. As there is most probably room for improvement, it might take us a decade before any progress is made. As a result, the best hope for protecting privacy is that the threats to online pace is outpaced by the technological protection.

Reference:

Eastin, M.S., Brinson, N.H., Doorey, A. and Wilcox, G., 2016. Living in a big data world: Predicting mobile commerce activity through privacy concerns. Computers in Human Behavior, 58, pp.214-220. Accessed on 27^th August 2018 from: < https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/39372/DOOREY-THESIS-2016.pdf?sequence=1>

Fiesler, C., Lampe, C. and Bruckman, A.S., 2016, February. Reality and perception of copyright terms of service for online content creation. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1450-1461). ACM.

Li, Y., 2012. Theories in online information privacy research: A critical review and an integrated framework. Decision Support Systems, 54(1), pp.471-481.

Mehmood, A., Natgunanathan, I., Xiang, Y., Hua, G. and Guo, S., 2016. Protection of big data privacy. IEEE access, 4, pp.1821-1834.

Obar, J.A. and Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., 2018. The biggest lie on the internet: Ignoring the privacy policies and terms of service policies of social networking services. Information, Communication & Society, pp.1-20. Accessed on 27^th August 2018 from: < https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.05096.pdf>

Reidenberg, J.R., Bhatia, J., Breaux, T.D. and Norton, T.B., 2016. Ambiguity in privacy policies and the impact of regulation. The Journal of Legal Studies, 45(S2), pp.1-29. Accessed on 28^th August 2018 from: < https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/reidenberg.pdf>

Thierer, A.D., 2015. The internet of things and wearable technology: addressing privacy and security concerns without derailing innovation. Rich. JL & Tech., 21, p.1. Accessed on 28^th August 2018 from: < https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1409&context=jolt>