Every counter-example to this is people being intentionally creepy, inappropriate, or outright malicious. Which was a manageable problem when it was just a single dude being weird, society would eventually exclude and shun them. Trouble is today that we've mechanised malicious inappropriate behavior at scale and ensured we've set up our entire society and government such that the people responsible can never be held accountable in any way. So long as you're being maliciously creepy at scale (and you're wealthy) everything's fine and there's no consequences.
the people doing the "analytics" (surveillance) like their privacy too, because they are doing creepy stuff and don't want people to know it. And even if they aren't doing creepy stuff, the data might be used that way in the future (profile building, psychological tricks, personalized pricing, sharing behavior with others, etc)
For the majority of people I don’t think it’s true that they don’t care, but rather that they don’t know, don’t understand the implications, or don’t have the luxury of being able to do anything about it.
In the instances where I was able to have a longer discussion with someone to really explain what’s going on, they did care. Even if they previously said they didn’t.
I think it's just that it's more of a visceral lizard-brain thing than a logical thing. Like how you can go through life eating meat every day, then someone sits you down and tells you the horrors of that industry and shows you a cow being butchered, and you go oh that's horrible, and then most likely put it out of mind and continue eating meat.
Nobody reads that stuff.
Please be honest with yourself. People don't read terms and conditions. There's a good chance you don't read terms and conditions. And even if you do, odds are better than even that you don't fully understand all the legal implications.
Terms and conditions pages nowadays are there mostly to provide legal protection under the guise of "the user told us that they read these by ticking a box on our signup page; it's hardly our fault if they didn't."
Firstly, businesses can do whatever they like. There are no terms to agree to. They simply function in whatever way they "consider to be valid". If a customer disagrees with what is valid or not, hey, that's what courts are for. And given there's no agreement between business and customer, who's to say who is right?
The business can equally terminate you as a customer, with no notice, for no reason, at any time. They can delete all your data. They can spam your contact list. (Ok, they do all that already, but you know what I mean.)
Secondly, customers can do whatever they like. They payed their $9.95. They can do whatever they like. Sure, sharing logins is fine (if they "consider that valid".) They can abuse the system, scrape data out and resell it, anything goes. And of course the only recourse is back to the courts. Which is ultimately no recourse at all.
Even your analogy to parking breaks down. Should you have to prove legal residency to park? Should I be able to park a car on the street (unmoved) for a year? Should I be allowed to park next to a fire-hydrant? Can I park it in the middle of the road? Can my neighbor "reserve" his parking space using an orange cone? Clearly there's a lot more to parking a car than "I should be able to park".
T&C might not be fun, and you may not agree with them (hint: if you don't, then don't use the service) but they at least set out the business behavior that you can expect. Read them, don't read them, that's up to you. But don't complain that the fault is on them when they do something that are in the T&Cs.
And yes, I get they're one sided. customers never bother to submit their own T&C's so they're not fairly represented. Again, that's on you for using that service.
This site itself is, funnily enough, a good example of this (and, to be fair, an outlier). When you sign up to an account here, you're not asked to agree to any terms. There's nothing that forces you to agree to any terms of service. The site does have them[0], but you can only access them by clicking the "Legal" link in the footer, and you're never required to do so. Yet people here are, by and large, behaving themselves, largely due to good moderation on the part of dang and others.
But if there were to be a lawsuit, for whatever reason, it's potentially possible that someone could successfully argue that they never had to agree to any terms. It's a technicality, of course - again, very few people read terms of service, and if they did, you'd think somebody would have noticed this omission by now - but an arguably legally actionable one.
Which leads me back to my point - the only reason that businesses make you agree to terms of service is because if they didn't, they could get lawsuits that might be found in favour of the plaintiff. Businesses don't want that, so they include the checkbox.
Already the case.
Every single terms and conditions document is just legal boilerplate that boils down to "we can do whatever we want, while you can do nothing we don't want".
It already works like that.
> customers never bother to submit their own T&C's so they're not fairly represented
You can't. Not a question of bother.
> if you don't, then don't use the service
The problem is that this is mostly not an option. The service doesn't have competition or competitors don't have better T&C. Sometimes, like in the original commenter's example, there is a legally enforced monopoly.
At least the government has to enforce certain rights when using government provided services.
Everyone understands websites use analytics and tracking, but people dont want to be reminded of it. Which is why people hate those FB ads which exactly match what you searched for 24 hours ago.