Let's get real about EULAs, please!

You must have heard of the latest Facebook controversy, this one the recent rollout of a Messenger app. Called simply Messenger, it is a standalone app for mobile devices that will replace the messaging function once done from within the Facebook app itself. Now if you message someone inside Facebook, this app opens automatically and you do it from there. The old way of messaging in FB is being discontinued and you’ve probably been hounded reminded for a long time by Facebook telling you to download the new app.

Okay, so what’s the big controversy? It has to do with the Messenger end user license agreement, to which users have to agree the first time they open it. You know the drill.

Because of its high degree of ubiquity in our lives, everything Facebook does gets a lot of scrutiny, and the EULA caused a big flap when bloggers and news sources actually read it and found – shockingly – the power that it gives itself to intrude on our lives and troll amongst our most private data and secrets. Starting with an article in the Huffington Post last December (recently updated and corrected), privacy-rights watchdogs raised the alarm about how Facebook would now access your camera, your microphone, your address book, your call history, your GPS location! It can send its own messages, make its own calls, take videos (all -- perhaps -- without you knowing!). According to the commentaries I’ve seen, this was the worst thing since the NSA did, well, just about all of that and more.

It’s time to look dispassionately and objectively at this issue. Several news sources stepped back and assessed the EULA in the context of todays’ technology and how these things work. The fact is, the Messenger app asked for no greater permissions than just about every app out there, if we would only read those agreements too. Virtually all of the capabilities required are there simply to enable features that we expect: for example, if you want to message someone a photo, then the app has to be able to access your photo stream. There is no reason to think that Zuckerberg and company plan to do any of this surreptitiously or with sinister intent. (Conspiracy junkies, feel free to forget that last sentence.)

Of course many are upset with websites and app providers (and Facebook is just the biggest of them) that intrude on our lives, get to know us better and then use that knowledge to target advertising and a myriad of sales pitches from spam to pop-ups. This is a legitimate concern, I think, but that genie is already out of the bottle and we are not going back to a simpler world. The one inescapable fact that we – all of us grazers at the great online free buffet – would rather not face is that free apps are not free. 

Snopes.com, that excellent urban-myth-busting site that we all love, had an excellent summary of the controversy, and said this about the free-app equation: “someone has to pay for [the free apps] development, deployment, and maintenance, and that funding is commonly accomplished these days by serving up ads to users. But advertisers want to be able target and personalize their ads to specific groups of viewers, and that targeting requires knowledge of information about users such as their geographic locations, age, browsing habits, and the like. Providing this information is the trade-off we engage in as ‘payment’ for the acquisition and use of free apps.”

It comes down to this: Terms of Service are complicated and require a lot of permissions just to get our tools to work, but work is what we expect them to do and the seamless convenience and low-hassle functionality is what we’ve become accustomed to. Being marketed to is the price we pay for free-but-not-free stuff, just as we’ve been exposed to ads in magazines and other media all our lives. It’s not going to change.

I’m currently reading a fascinating book called “Supreme City” about the history of New York City in the 1920s. One of the threads it follows is the early days of radio that took place at that time. Two prime movers were David Sarnoff and Bill Paley. Sarnoff, the innovator and visionary who started NBC, imagined radio as a free public service with high-brow and educational programming, untainted by advertising. Paley, founder of the upstart CBS that challenged Sarnoff, foresaw the immense commercial potential of the new medium, and actively sought sponsors and advertisements. Whose vision would win out? You can answer that one yourself.

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The story was also well-covered in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.