Documentary on surveillance: Terms and Conditions May Apply

Quiliro Ordóñez Baca writes: “Excellent documentary about surveillance. It could serve to convince people about the risk of surveillance and the use of social networks; especially the non-free ones.”

“Admit it: you don’t really read the endless terms and conditions connected to every website you visit, phone call you make or app you download. But every day, billion-dollar corporations are learning more about your interests, your friends and family, your finances, and your secrets, and they’re not only selling the information to the highest bidder, but also sharing it with the government. And you agreed to all of it. This disquieting exposé demonstrates how every one of us is incrementally opting-in to a real-time surveillance state, click by click- and what, if anything, you can do about it.”

Watch the video here:

Interview with the documentary maker:

7 Comments Documentary on surveillance: Terms and Conditions May Apply

  1. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    dear Quiliro, until last year, open formats were not shareable and had no embed codes. Has that situation changed and can we now share through embed codes ? Recommendations would be welcome.

  2. AvatarQuiliro Ordóñez

    Free formats are the only ones that are shareable.

    You can embed anything in a web page.

    I do not see what your problem was at the time. But if you mean that Youtube was not available to view on a free format, it has changed. You can now see Youtube in webm; which is a free format. But it is not the default https://www.youtube.com/html5 . Additionally, Youtube has Javascript that may be executed in your browser without you knowing what it does in your machine. I call that a virus.

    The current problem that we noticed with the video in this post is that it was taken down. We do not know if it was censored or the user took it down. The best is to upload to your own site and have the alternate link to the other site. Then you can publish it on a free format. The alternative to hosting it yourself (which is the best) is to upload it to archive.org on a free format. There still remains the issue that in order to embed a video some plugins use non-free software and have heavy surveillance code. You should choose a plugin to embed videos that avoids that.

  3. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    no, open formats, at least until the last time I tried, had no embed codes, you had to download them, re-upload them, which was too time-consuming, so they were must less shareable. Has that situation changed ?

  4. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    from your answer, I get that uploading is still needed. So you’re talking about sharing a video with an embed code that that seconds, vs. a whole technical operation that probably takes several dozen minutes.

  5. AvatarQuiliro Ordóñez

    no, open formats, at least until the last time I tried, had no embed codes, you had to download them, re-upload them, which was too time-consuming, so they were must less shareable. Has that situation changed ?

    What do you mean by embed codes? It has nothing to do with the format to embed a video. The CMS plugin handles embedding.

    from your answer, I get that uploading is still needed. So you’re talking about sharing a video with an embed code that that seconds, vs. a whole technical operation that probably takes several dozen minutes.

    Uploading a video to your own site gives you control over the information you posses. Otherwise it is under the other site’s control. It need not be a very technical operation. I don’t know if there is an easy way to do it. That is just a question of hiring the correct person to do it. I think what Bob suggests is a good suggestion. But there could be other options. You could also upload videos to a site that is not yours and link or embed the remote video. But the idea is to have sovereignty over your own resources. If you want to do that anyway, use https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances

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