After looking into the reams of pages of Terms and Conditions I had collected from popular social media sites, I realised I wanted to create a fictional dystopian surveillance company. After some brainstorming, I settled on 'Telescreen Technologies'. This name is a direct reference to Orwell's 1984 and draws from the ubiquitous telescreens in the novel, which monitor and broadcast propaganda to the populace. The name implies a corporation that surveils and influences behaviour through digital media.
Other options included:
Big Brother Enterprises (1984 - has been used extensively within society and media, and may therefore connect to other references rather than highlighting my own ideas)
Doublethink Dynamics (1984)
Farenheit Industries (Farenheit 451)
Newspeak Solutions (1984)
Atlas Conglomerate (Atlas Shrugged)
Room 101 Industries (1984)
Brave New Frontier Group (Brave New World)
I wrote my own set of dystopian terms and conditions that could be typical of Telescreen Technologies. While writing these, I tried to cover all the scopes of surveillance and privacy issues I am concerned about while also giving a well-rounded example of terms that could easily be accepted in the here and now without reading or understanding the complexities of what is being accepted. I felt these were very similar in satirical nature to the Fallout universe, which is a dystopian gaming series and now a television series. It focuses on the unintended consequences of large corporations being given unchallenged power at the point of civilisation's ultimate collapse.
Welcome to Telescreen Technologies, where your privacy is our commodity! By accessing or using our services, you agree to the following terms and conditions:
Surveillance Consent: By using our services, you consent to continuous surveillance and monitoring of all your online and offline activities, including but not limited to internet browsing, social media interactions, physical movements, and private communications. Telescreen Technologies reserves the right to collect, analyze, and store this data for any purpose deemed necessary by the company and its partners.
Data Exploitation: We may collect and exploit personal information about you from various sources, including your devices, third-party sources, and public records. This information may include but is not limited to your name, address, date of birth, biometric data, health records, financial information, and social media profiles. By using our services, you grant Telescreen Technologies unrestricted access to this data and relinquish any rights to privacy or confidentiality.
Privacy Erosion: We reserve the right to use your personal information for a variety of purposes, including targeted advertising, predictive analytics, behavioral profiling, social credit scoring, law enforcement purposes, and national security initiatives. Your data may be shared with government agencies, law enforcement authorities, corporate partners, and other third parties without your consent, further eroding your privacy rights.
Data Retention: Telescreen Technologies retains the right to store your personal information indefinitely, even after you cease using our services or terminate your account. This includes data collected through cookies, tracking pixels, log files, and other automated technologies. We may use this data to create detailed profiles of your behavior, preferences, and social connections, exacerbating the erosion of your privacy rights.
Data Insecurity: While Telescreen Technologies takes minimal measures to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your data against unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. By using our services, you acknowledge and accept the inherent risks associated with the collection and storage of personal data in the digital age, exacerbating the vulnerability of your privacy rights.
Opt-Out Illusion: You may request to opt out of certain data collection and processing activities by contacting our privacy team. However, please be aware that opting out may limit your access to certain features and functionalities of our services, and we reserve the right to deny or restrict your request at our discretion, further diminishing your control over your privacy rights.
Updates and Revisions: Telescreen Technologies may update or revise these terms and conditions at any time without prior notice. It is your responsibility to review the latest version of the terms periodically and comply with any changes or modifications. Continued use of our services constitutes acceptance of the updated terms, perpetuating the erosion of your privacy rights.
By clicking "I Agree" or accessing our services, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to these terms and conditions in their entirety. If you do not agree with any part of these terms, please refrain from using our services.
As I knew I did not have the technical or legal understanding to develop these terms further, I then asked ChatGPT to write this in more technical jargon, which is more accurate to the terms we accept every day, every time we visit a website. These technical terms make it more difficult for us to fully understand the take in the contracts that we are signing and I wanted to concrete the limitations of using this sort of language when addressing the general public. It is now becoming more common to be provided with simplified versions of the terms, but this is not happening fast enough. It used to be that we would only agree to contracts when we were making specific large purchases or creating legally binding agreements personally or professionally. What will be the unintended consequences of us being so quick to accept terms and conditions, and how will this affect the way we interact with more prevalent contracts in the future? Will this be something big corporations can capitalise on by reducing our privacy and human rights? How could these technologies be taken advantage of by governments in a world where greed, profit and power become ever more prevalent? How will they commodify these everyday interactions to take advantage and reduce our rights to transparency and ethical services through real-world practices?
ChatGPT:
"Of course! Here's a version of the terms and conditions with technical jargon that makes it harder to read:
Terms and Conditions of Use:
Welcome to Telescreen Technologies, where your privacy is our commodified asset! By accessing or utilizing our services, you hereby consent to the following stipulations:
Surveillance Consent: Your utilization of our services inherently implies your unconditional consent to perpetual surveillance and comprehensive monitoring of all your digital and physical activities, encompassing internet browsing, social media engagements, geospatial movements, and clandestine correspondences. Telescreen Technologies explicitly reserves the prerogative to conduct data acquisition, intricate analytics, and protracted data retention for purposes deemed requisite by the corporate entity and its affiliated consortiums.
Data Exploitation: We maintain the entitlement to procure and exploit a manifold array of personal data, drawn from diverse sources, inclusive of but not limited to, personal computing devices, supplementary third-party repositories, and publicly accessible registries. Said data shall encompass but is not restricted to personal nomenclature, residential addresses, chronological delineations, biometric data, medical histories, pecuniary records, and extant social network affiliations. Your interaction with our services effectively endows Telescreen Technologies with unrestricted ingress to this multifarious corpus of personal data, effectuating an abrogation of any residual vestiges of privacy or confidentiality.
Privacy Erosion: Telescreen Technologies is vested with the entitlement to utilize your personal data for multifaceted objectives, encompassing but not delimited to, targeted marketing initiatives, predictive modeling endeavors, behavioral profiling, social credit scoring mechanisms, law enforcement imperatives, and national security exigencies. Your personal data may be disseminated to governmental agencies, law enforcement bureaus, corporate affiliates, and ancillary third-party stakeholders sans explicit prior consent, exacerbating the progressive erosion of your residual privacy prerogatives.
Data Retention: The corporate entity retains unfettered authority to perpetually archive your personal data, notwithstanding the cessation of your utilization of our services or the cessation of your contractual association therewith. This comprehensive data reservoir encompasses data procured through cookies, pixel tracking mechanisms, log files, and ancillary automated data harvesting modalities. Said data may be employed to meticulously craft elaborate behavioral profiles, delineate intricate predilection matrices, and discern intimate social associations, thereby exacerbating the compounding erosion of your residual privacy entitlements.
Data Insecurity: Telescreen Technologies proffers nominal assurances regarding the fortification of your personal data against unauthorized access, inadvertent disclosure, surreptitious tampering, or inadvertent obliteration. Your utilization of our services mandates an acknowledgment and assumption of the inherent vulnerabilities attendant to the aggregation and preservation of personal data within the digital milieu, thereby engendering a concomitant diminution of your residual privacy entitlements.
Opt-Out Illusion: Ostensible avenues for opting out of specific data acquisition and processing modalities are nominally available, contingent upon petitioning our privacy oversight consortium. It is incumbent upon you to appreciate that the act of opting out may precipitate a curtailment of your access to select service functionalities and may be subject to arbitrary denial or circumscription at our sole discretion, thereby instigating an intensified fracturing of your residual autonomy over your privacy entitlements.
Updates and Revisions: Telescreen Technologies explicitly reserves the prerogative to effectuate periodic updates or revisions to the present terms and conditions sans antecedent notification. It is incumbent upon you to conscientiously review the most recent iteration of the terms and conditions on a periodic basis and to meticulously adhere to any subsequent modifications or amendments. Continued utilization of our services serves as an incontrovertible attestation of your unequivocal endorsement of the updated terms, perpetuating the progressive erosion of your residual privacy entitlements.
By assenting to these stipulations and conditions, or by engaging with our services, you implicitly attest to having perused, comprehended, and assented to the entirety of the present terms and conditions. Should any aspect of these stipulations be incompatible with your personal predilections or beliefs, we respectfully exhort you to refrain from engaging with our services."
Comments