Statement of Intent:
What makes a person give up their right to privacy? How easy is it to legally make someone give away these rights?
Our cities spy on us with ubiquitous surveillance cameras while our Internet Service Providers are being pushed to record what we do online. Even if you are a person with nothing to hide, should you give up your privacy? Everyone poops, but it takes a rather unusual person to not prefer to close the washroom door.
My concept focuses on the ridiculous ease at which lawyers and companies, often through non-negotiable End-User License Agreements (EULAs) or Terms of Service (ToS) currently make us give up our rights to privacy, our rights to pursue legal action, and any number of other rights. We are said to have agreed to increasingly labyrinthine legal terms by simply reading a sign, by opening a package, or by buying from a certain store. Nowadays, there’s often no signature required – not even a box to tick. And if we disagree?
There are no negotiations for these legal contracts, and the terms of the EULA or other such notice might have originally been written by a lawyer three companies over, ten years ago, and later copied by a separate company who thought the terms fit.
So by simply walking onto a certain street or opening a box, we are supposedly agreeing to suspend our personal rights. But we are not just losing our privacy.
The legalese of Myspace.com used to claim ownership over all the music, text, or anything else uploaded to their system. According to Facebook.com’s ‘Statement of Rights and Responsibilities’ today, Facebook own all videos and photos posted there. So not only are we giving up our right to privacy, we’re also giving away our rights to what we create, and, for most people, doing so without even knowing it.
My artwork consists of posting a series of such involuntarily-agreed-upon legalese agreements throughout the room. These will range from the simpler ‘by reading this sign you allow us to record you’ (though written in far more legalese) to the more extreme ‘by using this toilet you allow us the right to analyze all disposed matter and use it to personally identify you’. Each agreement will take a humorous slant into the realm of the ridiculous to help prove my point. See the included Supporting Illustrations file for a closer look.
Artist Bio:
Andrew Wade is a playwright and actor pursuing two degrees at the University of Victoria. His plays Hullaboo and High School Noir were recently featured in this summer’s IGNITE! Youth Festival. Other produced playwriting highlights include Alice From Wonderland (SATCo), William Vs. The World (FIND Studio Series – Festival for Innovative and New Drama), and All Fall Down (as part of 2008’s Schoolhouse Rocks event). He is currently acting in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Phoenix Theatre in Victoria.
Andrew is quickly developing a man-crush on Cory Doctorow and finds great hope in technology, but really, really wishes we would stop willingly giving up our rights and freedoms in unnegotiated agreements, and stop investing so much money, time, and fear into useless security systems that watch everyone, and therefore watch no one. For advice on what to do in the possibility of a police state, he recommends you all read Doctorow’s book ‘Little Brother’, found as a free download at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download . When it comes to these sorts of issues, Cory’s just so intelligent and wise and dreamy and-
Ahem. Sorry about that.