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"  Last week, GM&amp;#039;s OnStar service required its customers to agree to a new set of terms and conditions. This sort of task is part of our daily routine as technology-using Homo sapiens. Scroll through a few thousand lines of legal jargon. Check a box. Grunt. Move on with your life.  But OnStar asked for something a bit unprecedented. Its new terms and conditions stated that even if a subscriber canceled the service, the company was still free to track the car&amp;#039;s position, speed, and even whether or not the driver was wearing a seatbelt. Users could opt out, but they&amp;#039;d have to know to ask. If they didn&amp;#039;t, OnStar was free to collect and sell this data for as long as your Chevy Avalanche kept on truckin&amp;#039;. When the story broke, customers started sharing hacks to turn off the transmitters, and three members of the U.S. Senate responded in force. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said the maneuver was &amp;quot;one of the most brazen invasions of privacy in recent memory,&amp;quot; while calling for intervention by the Federal Trade Commission. Everyone was just flabbergasted by this violation of our privacy. Sure, OnStar could follow us to work every single day if we paid for it, and use its location service to find us in case of an accident. But use our information as part of anonymous global statistics if we weren&amp;#039;t handing them our money? Or track us through the McDonald&amp;#039;s drive-through without our consent? It&amp;#039;s an outrage. Now that OnStar has been publicly embarrassed and pulled the policy, let&amp;#039;s be serious: We&amp;#039;re being overdramatic. It&amp;#039;s time all of us stop pretending that we care about privacy in the digital age. Our collective outrage wasn&amp;#039;t really about OnStar collecting our data after we discontinued the service. We were embarrassed that we clicked the box and said, &amp;quot;I agree.&amp;quot;  Privacy, Really? When these kinds of privacy issues come up, tech users collectively scream Big Brother\u2014we&amp;#039;re victims of something larger and more powerful than ourselves. And after being upset for a few minutes, we pull out our smartphones, use Google Maps to find the bar (avoiding the busy routes, marked by other users), check-in via Foursquare, tweet about it, snag a quick photo of our burger with Instagram (might as well toss in the latitudinal-longitudinal coordinates just for good measure), and, on the way home, use the Spotify app to dig through our friend&amp;#039;s latest songs for some good driving music.  This is all your data, and it&amp;#039;s so much more personal and relevant to marketers than any series of dots on a map that OnStar can provide. People who use social media\u2014and especially location services\u2014create an information stream that includes the where and the why. It&amp;#039;s your friends, lovers, passions, and regrets. And none of it would be accessible to anyone if we weren&amp;#039;t broadcasting a barrage of it all the time. So consumers have to stop playing coy: If we didn&amp;#039;t want Mark Zuckerberg to have our photos, then we&amp;#039;d stop handing them to him, and we wouldn&amp;#039;t rely on the honesty of businesses or the good graces of government to take care of our online personae. The truth is: When it come to online privacy, what really gets people mad is the principle of the thing, but we just don&amp;#039;t care enough about our principles to leave a good party. (Maybe more people follow through on their threats to quit Facebook than follow through on their threats to move to Canada if Americans elect an embarrassing president, but not many more: Despite the defections, Facebook&amp;#039;s user base now stands close to 800 million worldwide.) Besides, if you set aside feelings of unease, what&amp;#039;s the big deal if a company makes a profit off of your data? No one&amp;#039;s life has taken a noticeable turn for the worse since allowing some iPhone app to activate location services, or because their data was mixed with the data of millions of other users, melted and diluted into a generic regional stat to help Levi&amp;#039;s sell more Ex-Girlfriend Jeans. An employer may very well screen your comments on Twitter, but nobody suffers from anonymous statistics.  The problem with OnStar is that while what it was doing was quite possibly legal, it felt sleazy. Ultimately, it&amp;#039;s not the anonymous data that users care about. It&amp;#039;s when a company sneaks something behind our backs, such as the OnStar data collection, because it&amp;#039;s paranoid that we would take offense. If it ever comes to light, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One Contract Above All Others? OnStar capitalized on the fact that no consumer reads through the tens of thousands of words that most terms and conditions consist of before checking the &amp;quot;I Read It!&amp;quot; box. And that&amp;#039;s not really our fault. Even if we tried, we&amp;#039;d never understand the legalese. But as long as this is the way we agree to terms of service with tech companies, these eruptions of outrage when companies get caught trying to slip one by us will keep happening. I think there has got to be a way to simplify all this, where customers could know, simply, how much of their data a company will share. When I asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting citizen rights online, people there thought so, too. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s fair for there to be a regime where everyone has to read every single privacy policy, or people will have one pulled over on them,&amp;quot; media relations director Rebecca Jeschke says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want that future; only the marketers want that future.&amp;quot;  At the moment, that is our present and our near future. So I came up with my own plan, based on an existing precedent for everyday consumers understanding complex legal issues: Creative Commons licensing. A group of artists, lawyers, technologists, and entrepreneurs pooled their collective expertise and created a system of very clear designations for any piece of media that someone shares online. Because of Creative Commons licensing, I can upload a photo of my cat and declare, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re totally free to sell this,&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re free to edit my photo but don&amp;#039;t you dare collect a profit,&amp;quot; and all through a single system. Couldn&amp;#039;t the same thing work for terms of service? To the EFF, I quickly proposed a system where a team of lawyers could create clearly labeled privacy standards for all modern digital products. Rather than 100 pages of terms and conditions, Apple would put a standardized seal of approval on an iPhone that says it can track my location but never identify me. The first time I load Instagram, perhaps a different seal designates that they can identify and share my information, but they&amp;#039;ll never sell it.  &amp;quot;Right now, in the market, there is a hole to fill for privacy protective companies,&amp;quot; Jeschke says. &amp;quot;OnStar found out they had a PR problem. That&amp;#039;s why they fixed it. It makes sense for companies to be privacy protective and make it a pitch they can offer to their customers.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#039;s a nice future to consider. But the EFF still wasn&amp;#039;t so confident my idea would work, because there&amp;#039;s one huge hitch. Even if a team of lawyers could draft a rock-solid omnicontract and got companies on board, EFF officials says, no service can guarantee your data will remain private so long as a government warrant can collect whatever it wants from whomever it wants.  It was a staunch reminder. Even if OnStar, or Facebook, or Apple could fairly be called Big Brother, let&amp;#039;s not forget that Big Daddy will always be standing just over the shoulder. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a7230/the-onstar-incident-isnt-about-digital-privacy-6499661/>