Natasha Singer

The contemporary internet was built on a bargain: Show us who you really are and the digital world will be free to search or share. People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen. Now, the consumer surveillance model underlying Facebook and Google’s free services is under siege from users, regulators and legislators on both sides of the Atlantic.

ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy. Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.

Jessica Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice. The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”

“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Rich wrote. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”

Rich recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -- or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.

The terms of service on many websites are so wordy and so legalistic that users may not understand -- or even be aware of -- the intellectual property rights that they cede when they check the “agree” box to set up an account, according to a new study from researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Georgia Tech study reviewed 30 popular social networking and creative community sites that encourage people to share material, examining the rights to use work that were claimed in the sites’ terms of service agreements. Sites examined in the study included: Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, IMDB, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Remix64 and Fanfiction. Of course, people who wish to see their creative work published need to permit certain uses -- like authorizing a site to publicly post their content. But users may be surprised to learn about other permission they must grant in order to use a site.

For instance, the study reported that 11 of the sites required users to agree that the sites could license their content to a third party. Yet users are unlikely to understand what they are agreeing to because terms of service agreements tend to be daunting in length and readability. The Georgia Tech researchers calculated that it would take someone nearly eight hours to read the agreements on the 30 sites in the study, at an average adult pace of 250 words per minute.