BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
So, the points I had accumulated with a company were about to expire. Use them or lose them, the notice said. But don’t despair. You can redeem your points today. It’s easy. Simply check the box next to magazines to which you want to subscribe and they’ll be on your doorstep in a matter of days. Oh, goodie.
The last time I ordered magazines, I believed I could win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
The only magazine I’ve subscribed to since is the Minneapolis-St Paul magazine. It’s the best, and if you live in Minnesota or used to live in Minnesota or used to live near Minnesota and don’t get it, well you don’t get it, as the Washington Post likes to say. But I digress.
Then I saw it. In the list of magazines was a subscription to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). I like the WSJ, so I checked the box and sent it in. The paper never came. What did come was a letter from the publication telling me they were happy I subscribed, but in order to get my paper I had to jump through a few more hoops. Step 1, go to the online sign up place, WSJ.com/activate3. Step 2, enter my 12-digit account number and then, Step 3, submit my information. “It’s included in your subscription to the Wall Street Journal.”
If I were too dumb to follow those simple instructions, I could call an 800 number.
When I got to the website, it asked for the usual stuff: name, address, email address, repeat the email address, a password, repeat the password, and a security question, like who was the first girl you kissed or what year did your brother start losing his hair. Finally, I had to check my email options, how much propaganda and advertisements I wanted to get from the Wall Street Journal and all their friends up and down Wall Street.
I thought this is a lot of work for a lousy subscription to a newspaper I could pick up at the local CVS.
But once you start something….I filled out the forms and hit the submit button. Nothing. I tapped it again, a little harder. I got a message. I had not agreed to their terms. I had failed to notice the little box with more instructions: “You must read and agree to our Subscriber Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to become a subscriber to WSJ Digital.”
Cookie Policy? Maybe they wanted me to be assured that their Christmas cookie collection is baked in canola oil.
I know, most people just click on these agree boxes and get on with their lives, but I like to at least look at, if not necessarily read, what I am agreeing to before getting on with my life. So I clicked on the Subscriber Agreement. It was nine pages long, single-spaced. So much for that. I clicked on the Privacy Policy. It was seven pages. Cookie Policy? It was five pages. There were a total of 21 pages of legalese to subscribe to a paper available on the street corner.
After describing the eight different kinds of cookies the Wall Street Journal intended to implant in my computer—none of which was chocolate chip–there was this explanation:
“In some circumstances, we may use functionality cookies…(that) allow us to remember the choices you make while browsing the Site, and to provide enhanced and more personalized content and features, such as customizing a certain webpage, remembering if we have asked you to participate in a promotion and for other services you request… In order to permit your connection to the Site, our servers receive and record information about your computer, device and browser, potentially including your IP address, browser type and other software or hardware information.”
There’s another section on analytical cookies and cookies from unknown third parties. In other words, the world being at your fingertips is a two-way street. The world has more access to you than you have to the world.
Another name for cookies is licensed, legal spyware.
The Wall Street Journal’s agreements are puny compared to those of Comcast, which run 22 pages and Citibank’s credit card documentation that also runs more than 20 pages. The intrusion of Facebook and other social media sites is even worse. For example, you agree to give Facebook access to messages you write but never post.
And in too many cases, agreements include instructions to go to yet other websites to change information or obtain other critical information, including those faceless third-party partners, where even more of your privacy is sacrificed on the altar of commerce. Carnegie Mellon researchers determined that it would take the average American 76 work days to read all the privacy policies they agreed to each year, according to the Huffington Post.
These agreements in language most people can’t understand and in a typeface most people can’t see let alone read are a sad commentary on the state of the news business, which has to hustle advertising by selling your privacy on the open market, but it is also a sad commentary on corporate America and our technology saturated society in general.
It is not just our privacy we are allowing to be compromised, either. It is also our security, both personal and national. We are opening up gaping vulnerabilities, an exposure we may well come to regret as cyber raiders, cyber criminals, and worst of all, cyber terrorists, strip from us so much that we hold dear and much that enables this new Internet lifestyle.
My millennial friends and relatives say, forgeddaboutit. Privacy is dead and buried. It is so 20th Century.
If only Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Douglass, two jurists poles apart politically and ideologically, could see us now. They both warned decades ago of the dangers of giving up our right to privacy, not only to government, but powerful private interests as well. They were right. Power that is concentrated in the hands of the few cannot serve the many. Giving up who you are and what you are is giving up power. Someone once said that one of the advantages we have in life is knowing about ourselves what no others do.
No one should click on a box, agreeing to 20 pages of agreements, stipulations, conditions contractual obligations and cookie chips (there’s a reason they call them cookies and not personal information tracking devices), without even reading them. It doesn’t make sense, but it must happen thousands of times a day, without a blink of the eye.
I didn’t check the box, of course, so I’ll have to read someone else’s Journal when they’re through with it. When I read it now, however, it will be with a new appreciation for how the media can keep coming up with innovative ways to invade personal privacy for fun and profit.
A recent report, by Ernst &Young noted in the Washington Post, found that “Top media and entertainment firms will have higher average profit margins than firms in the top stock indexes, as they finally find new ways to make money from the Internet…” The new way they’re making money, is you.
Something good always comes of something bad, and true enough, since I didn’t check the WSJ subscription box, I went back and looked at the others. I am now getting Golf Digest.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.