Author Jacob Silverman digs deeply into various social media platforms and uncovers not only privacy violations but also underlying attitudes adopted by the platform owners that point towards a future that is completely controlled by digital government watchdogs and technological elites.
Terms of Service is a terrifying book to me in many ways.
I knew some of the pitfalls of the big networks like Facebook, but I didn’t know all of them. This book changed the way that I view the portable devices that everyone carries around with them. Instead of helpful tools, I now see that they can be a chilling and impersonal form of control and surveillance, if we let them.
Terms of Service isn’t all doom and gloom though. Silverman gives the reader innovative ways to buck the bland, over-sharing majority and examples of creative hackers and programmers who are doing just that.
He also suggests some sweeping societal changes within the government like a twenty-first century Bill of Rights to address the troubles and privacy challenges of technology and a universal minimum wage to unlock the chains of digital serfdom.
It’s an exciting possible vision for the future. I wonder if we will ever manage to do any of that.
This is the part of the review where I try to list read-alikes or books with a similar theme, but I think that Terms of Service is in a class all of its own. I think parents, educators, politicians, and anyone who uses the internet should read and discuss this book.
It is only through knowing the dangers of constant connection that we can begin to address them. Terms of Service provides an eye-opening and disturbing view of how far we have let the situation go.
But, never fear, with proper education- like reading this book- anything is possible.
I received a free advanced reader’s copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads. FTC guidelines: check! And thanks for reading.
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