“I HAVE READ AND AGREE TO SHARE MY LIFE WITH YOU”: Building Trust with Comprehensible Terms of Service Agreements by Mert Kocabagli A TERMINAL PROJECT Presented to the School of Journalism and Communication In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Advertising and Brand Responsibility Spring, 2020 Approved by: _______________________ Adviser: Maxwell Foxman, Ph.D. Introduction This paper seeks to advise on social media platforms’ inconsiderate design decisions that mislead users on their terms of services (ToS) and other related agreements. Within the context of social media platforms, the role of data collection and related design decisions have a big impact in today’s digital society and economy. In the current tech-driven society, brands’ business models rely on specifically written elements in the ToS on their products or services to collect consumers’ data to sell to third parties. If one looks at recent technology scandals, inconsiderate design decisions on the ToS and related unethical data practices are the cause of the majority of incidents. An example is the recent Facebook scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. According to the federal trade commission’s post on July 24, 2019, Facebook received the penalty for violating consumers’ privacy and its the largest penalty ever given by the U.S government for any violation. The purpose of the penalty is to discourage future privacy related violations and, more importantly, to address Facebook's approach to privacy (FTC, 2019). Consumer privacy is important for both social media platforms and its users in different ways; the lack of readability and awareness of the ToS and its content creates an advantage for platforms to manipulate its users' privacy and information. Responsible brands are aware of the importance of their consumers' privacy and meet their changing needs to create long-term customer loyalty and a strong reputation as a brand. Unethical data practices, and related design decision models have a negative influence on long-term business strategies because brands may permanently lose their consumers’ trust. I recommend user interface and experience design are solutions for improving difficult to navigate ToS agreements apart from updating esoteric legal language. The goal of the paper is to prove that ToS designed in a user-friendly way can actually help to educate users about their 2 information usage by social media platforms and give them the opportunity to make conscious decisions before registering. Creating transparency through user-friendly ToS and commitment to social good while remaining profitable makes a social media platform responsible. Literature Review What are Terms of Service and End User License Agreements? The terms of service, ToS, are legal contracts including sets of rules that users have to read and then agree to in order to use the service or product. The ToS also refers to Terms of Use, Terms and Conditions, or Disclaimer depending on the product. There are not any existing laws that require brands to have the ToS, it is optional (Termsfeed, 2020). Brands need ToS to protect themselves, own their content, terminate accounts, and limit liability for their services or products (Termsfeed, 2020). The end user license agreement, EULA, is a legal contract between a software creator or publisher and the software user. The EULA also refers to Software Licenses, User Agreements, License Agreements, and Licensed Application End-User Agreements. Software brands have to have an EULA, so that users agree not to resell the software without benefiting the software creator (Upcounsel, n.d.). Virtual platforms, like web browsers, social media platforms, and games, define their monetization models in the platforms’ ToS agreements, and, by agreeing to them, users clearly accept that they are aware of how the platform continues its service. Creators of these virtual platforms monetized their virtual worlds by selling specifically designed, built-in assets and features, and this creates virtual economies. These assets and features are defined in these 3 platforms’ ToS agreements. The article, “Virtual Economies, Virtual Goods and Service Delivery in Virtual Worlds” mainly explains the differences between virtual economies and ​ ​ ​ ​ non-virtual economies with related examples. The article only gives an example of how games protect their content and platform, so it overlooks different virtual industries’ privacy and protection issues like how instagram protects users' content (Spence, 2010). However, users are not actually aware when they click “accept” because they lack a complete understanding of what exactly is defined in ToS agreements because they rush and skim the agreements. Creators of virtual platforms, both gaming and social media platforms, are aware of the issues behind the ToS, but they prefer to intentionally benefit from the problem and to grow their businesses instead of protecting their users' information and obtaining their trust. Privacy, Confusion Over Language, and the Lack of Standards When it comes to privacy, companies should not draw a distinction between virtual and real-life because many users prefer using their real identities on the internet, but companies are not giving the same privacy and identity protection as in offline life. The paper “Public lives and private communities” explains that the concept of privacy does not mean anything in virtual ​ ​ ​ ​ worlds, online games, social media platforms, and other internet-based platforms because the creators of those platforms do not follow a democratic approach to respect their users’ intellectual property rights by selling their information to third parties. However, the paper fails to address privacy issues and to make recommendations to help increase users’ engagement with the ToS before using the platforms (Halbert, 2020). Since brands and users can have 4 disagreements on the subject of privacy, brands, virtual or not, must put consumers’ concerns in the center of their business in order to build transparency and trust. Being online in any brand’s platform requires giving away certain information and privacy about one's life due to the regulation of online platforms. Regulators of online platforms initially created ToS, privacy policies, and other related legal contracts not in the interest of their users, but instead so that they could protect themselves and maximize their economic benefits from their platforms. The paper “Private ordering and the rise of terms of service as cyber-regulation” primarily discusses that the regularity function of terms of services does not ​ ​ ​ ​ protect users’ rights and thus affects the internet users’ ability to enjoy online platforms and mobile applications because users know that each of their interactions will be recorded by platforms to sell to third parties. According to the paper: “ISO 26000 offers guidance for businesses on how to involve affected stakeholders in the policy elaboration as well as on how to implement social responsibility, including through transparency, accountability and human rights obligations.” The paper recommends that the International Standards Organization, ISO, 26000 could be a solution to protect users' privacy in online platforms. However, the paper omits particular examples of ISO 26000 practices in any online platforms. Standardizing ToS with ISO might be challenging because each platform offers and monetizes its service differently (Belli & Venturini, 2016). There are three common models for the monetization and data usage identified in social media platforms’ ToS and these differences make it hard to standardize. Since, some brands, like Facebook and LinkedIn, sell their users’ data to third parties and advertisers for profit. Other brands, such as Spotify, use subscription models which stops showing advertising with a purchased membership. Completely separate from the previous two models, other brands, like WT.Social, rely on donations from users without selling any data or showing any 5 advertising. Even though there are different business models, they all rely on information displayed in the ToS. The lack of patience on the part of users while registering on online platforms and downloading softwares causes the biggest technology and privacy problems for consumers. Many consumers unintentionally rush reading privacy policies and ToS because they just want to start exploring. The paper “The Biggest Lie on the Internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services” focuses on identifying the degree ​ ​ ​ towhich different readers ignore or the privacy policies and ToS pages while signing up and ​ using social media platforms. Users value privacy, however, when it comes to ToS, privacy comes second to starting to use social media platforms. The paper’s findings do not include any suggestions for addressing the ignoring of ToS policies besides government regulation on ToS (Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018). In certain occupations and circumstances, ignoring the ToS and privacy policies is incredibly risky and can lead to cybercrime. Brands are accountable, to a degree, for cybercrime and other risky situations faced by their users because of their unethical decisions regarding their ToS pages. The article “Just a click away: terms of service and privacy policy” discusses school psychologists’ inadvertent violations made by not reading legal agreements which could put students’ information at risk. The article describes the legal