'Terms And Conditions' And Us — Oh, My ...
* A Minnesota father berates a Target manager after a coupon mailing offers his teen daughter a discount on baby furniture and maternity wear, only to discover that the young woman is in fact already pregnant. (Data mining? Working like it was designed to.)
* A New York City comic, frustrated with his experience at an Apple Genius Bar, takes to Facebook to quote Fight Club on the virtues of the Armalite AR-10 semiautomatic, after which a New York City SWAT team pays him a visit — and not to discuss the cinema.
* British police use social-media traffic to pre-emptively arrest a gaggle of London street-theater types made up as a zombie wedding party, holding them for more than 24 hours so 2011's royal nuptials could proceed without risking the involvement of braaaaains.
There's more, including the one about the AOL data dump suggesting that this one guy might have been planning his wife's murder ... or might have been a TV crime-drama writer Googling for plot ideas. But you get the idea: There's a lot of detail about you out there, and it's subject to a whole lot of scrutiny — and an awful lot of potential misinterpretation.
As for that second question, Hoback and his team suggest, with a kind of enervated fatalism, that between the headlong rush to make a killing on search and social media and a political establishment not eager to preside over another Sept. 11, there's not much hope of re-bottling the privacy genie.
To put it another way: With the Facebooks and the AT&Ts of the world hungry to know you better for the bottom line's sake, and with the government empowered to ask them to pass along what they know without the bother of a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure test, the goose of privacy has been cooked, sauced and served.
But then we, the film points out gently but sternly, are as culpable as any gung-ho G-man or grasping Google exec for the situation we find ourselves in. The assembled privacy activists, from ACLU attorneys to the bespectacled, bemused musician Moby, are quick to point out that our hungry adoption of a digital lifestyle has meant the creation of a culture in which everyone's an informant on a scale the Stasi could never have dreamed of.
Each shared selfie, each sepia-toned short video, each oh-so-clever status update, under these Terms and Conditions, is an opt-in that involves a certain measure of surrender — to a new status quo we've been astonishingly willing to (click) accept.