Every time you sign up for an account online, do you read the Terms of Service? Probably not! These lengthy documents are not easy to get through. However, they provide useful information
about the data they collect from you, whether it be search terms you are using, webpages you visited, or PDFs you may have saved. This goes for accounts for social media, web browsers, and even library databases and resources.
The Terms of Service Didn’t Read Site can help you break down these terms, especially in popular online resources and services. The site provides color coding and grades to help you easily see how and where these services protect your privacy.
The easiest way to protect your privacy is to not create an account; however, in doing this, we give up convenience and a means for saving information to come back to later, answers on test prep resources, or a means for placing an online order. There are some ways we can protect privacy without giving up convenience, such as using a private browser for searching. Options include DuckDuckGo, Brave, and Tor.
Choose Privacy Every Day is an initiative supported by the American Library Association that invites library users into a national conversation about privacy rights in the digital age. For more information about protecting your privacy as a digital information consumer and privacy in the news, see the Choose Privacy Every Day Blog.