How The Dude Was Duped By Big Tech

A website with The Big Lebowski quotes was blocked for no reason by Facebook. Looking for justice at a tech company that has automated the enforcement of its rules. Written by Reinier Kist.

Cult film The Big Lebowski (1998, directed by the Coen Brothers) tells the story of The Dude: a former hippie minding his own business, who falls prey to powers that are bigger than himself. The Dude happily fills his days bowling, smoking joints, bathing and drinking White Russians. But the easy life of this Californian Oblomov — on flip flops, wearing a bath robe, and brilliantly portrayed by Jeff Bridges — is roughly upended one day when two thugs kick in his door, threaten him, and pee on his rug. That act drags The Dude into a plot full of misunderstandings and colorful characters. An at the end, after his weird adventures, it turns out that all of it — spoiler alert — was for nothing.

This story is not about The Big Lebowski, but about thebiglebow.ski, a search engine for quotes from the film. A film which, more than 20 years after being released, still has a large number of loyal fans. Like The Dude in the film, the website and its founder Hans de Zwart became beholden to bigger powers. And just as in the film, the whole plot turns out to be based on a misunderstanding. But before that becomes clear, De Zwart has to go on a monthslong odyssey full of frustration and wondrous twists and turns.

Abusive?

The story begins when thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook. Hans de Zwart, like The Dude a former activist who is taking it easy, has launched the site in the middle of May. The former director of dutch digital rights organization Bits of Freedom is a fan of The Big Lebowski. He has noticed that there isn’t a good search engine for quotes from the film. “Even though about every single sentence from the script is eminently quotable,” says De Zwart. So he builds the search engine in a week, including the possibility to share the quote on social media.

This is where Facebook says: no. Users who want to share their favorite quotes on the social network get the following message: “Your message couldn’t be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.” Facebook subsidiary Instagram also blocks the site. Who has reported him? And Why? These questions put De Zwart on a search for justice.

De Zwart wants to complain to Facebook, but that is only possible if he has a Facebook account. As a digital rights activist he doesn’t participate in social media, mainly because he doesn’t want to add to the surveillance economy. Still, he decides to create an account.

He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.”

Then it turns out that Facebook doesn’t see De Zwart’s complaint as a complaint, but as an “experience”. The chance that Facebook will look at it is small. At the top of the complaint form is the following message: “While we aren’t able to review individual reports, the feedback you provide will help us improve the ways we keep Facebook safe.” When he hands in his complaint he gets a message: “Thank you for your experience.”

After a few weeks of waiting, it becomes clear to De Zwart that no one at Facebook will look at his complaint. He still has no idea what part of his website is “abusive” and why he is being blocked.

Automated decisions

Facebook and Instagram have grown into essential communication platforms with billions of people sharing information and news. And for many (online) businesses these sites are the only way to reach their customers. That is why it is important that the information on Facebook and its subsidiaries find their way to users in a transparant and honest way. And that there is an equitable complaints procedure for people whose website has been blocked for whatever reason.

The power of the large internet platforms, and the responsibility that comes with that power, was the subject of a historical antitrust hearing at the US House of Representatives this year. Being a digital rights activist, De Zwart knows this discussion very well, so he starts to meticulously log his attempts to get clarity.

Halfway June, De Zwart tries to buy a Facebook ad for his website. He has read that Facebook might be willing to listen to your complaints if you are spending advertising dollars with the company. He creates a completely innocent advertisement and pays 5 euro to distribute it to the users of the network.

The advert is rejected, “this ad contains or refers to content that has been blocked by our security systems (#1885260)”, notes Facebook. De Zwart has no idea what the error code means and to complain about this, he first needs to agree to four sets of legal terms. Which he does, without reading them. But after reporting the problem, he again gets no indication whether Facebook is planning to do anything with his complaint. “Thanks for helping us improve!” is the happy message from the platform.

Writing in his log book he notes that he now has another problem: “I want my 5 euro back, but I can’t find any way of doing that.”

He thinks about just letting it all go. Of course he doesn’t really care about the 5 euro, it is the principle that matters. All the while he is clicking himself into an RSI injury, trying to keep all the settings on his Facebook account as privacy friendly as possible.

Why does he worry himself so much over this? De Zwart sees “the arbitrary (not to say totalitarian) decisions of the company” as a serious limitation on our freedoms, he emails to the author of this article. Especially since so many people have become very dependent on Facebook.

He considers the block to be “ridiculously disproportional”. Pages of the website which evidently don’t violate any of the ‘community standards’ and also don’t have any potential copyright issues, can’t be shared either. De Zwart doesn’t understand why it is completely impossible to get some form of due process at Facebook. He believes that there should be a working complaints procedure for website owners. A procedure that can also be used by people who don’t have a Facebook account.

Prophetic words

“It appears that Facebook will only look at problems if they realize that it might cost them too much political or media capital if they continue to ignore them”, writes De Zwart at the end of his email.

These words turn out to be prophetic. A few days after the author of this article presents the case to a Facebook PR person, the problem is solved. Nobody had reported his website for “abusive” material — just like the film revolves around a kidnapping incident that has never taken place. The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.”

Thebiglebow.ski can now be shared without limitations on Facebook: a bittersweet victory. “If this can happen to me, then I should assume that this happens to (tens or hundreds of) thousands of other people too”, according to De Zwart.

The end of the film is similarly bittersweet. The dude has an even nicer rug, but loses a friend. Hans de Zwart still hasn’t gotten his 5 euro back.

This article was written by Reinier Kist and originally appeared in Dutch in NRC on August 3rd, 2020. It was translated into English by Hans de Zwart.

The Books I Read in 2019

At the end of each year, I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2019. Every year I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds and podcasts).

This was a slow reading year for me: I only managed to read 39 books for a total of 10.350 pages (last year I managed 52 books and 12.417 pages). It was a busy year, where I was trying to close out and hand over my work at Bits of Freedom, while also preparing for a year of travel and organising a huge real life game.

Only about 24% of the authors that I read were women. That is a bad result and reflects the fact that I didn’t put a lot of intentionality in my reading: I mostly just read in a very instrumental way, picking up books as I felt that I needed them.

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me (and that are in many ways overlapping and arbitrary). These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

Digital rights and technology

None of the books that I read in this category gave me huge new insights nor a new framework of looking at technology. Kaye’s short book is a good introduction for people who haven’t thought much about the topic. Brunton was less on the ball than in his previous books. And Van Dijck and Poell give a useful definition of platforms in the context of an argument for public values. The book with the most staying power (at least for me) is probably Odell’s.

David Kaye — Speech Police (link)
Finn Brunton — Digital Cash (link)
Jenny Odell — How To Do Nothing (link)
José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waal — The Platform Society (link)
Marjolein Lanzing — The Transparent Self: A normative investigation of changing selves and relationships in the age of the quantified self (link)
Jan Kuitenbrouwer — Datadictatuur (link)
Alexander Belgraver and Silvia Belgraver — Eerlijk nieuws zonder censuur (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

We only read six books with the book club this year. The most monumental and thought provoking is certainly Zuboff’s book, which gave us a whole new vocabulary with which to critique what we now call ‘surveillance capitalists’. I enjoyed finally hearing how Snowden managed to get those files out of the NSA, and thought that Modderkolk did some amazing pieces of journalism in his book about ‘cyber security’. Stross proved once more that I am not the type for science fiction (I’ll keep trying though). Both Van Essen and Pomerantsev had some memorable scenes in their books, but both didn’t manage to fully convince me in other ways.

Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (link)
Edward Snowden — Permanent Record (link)
Huib Modderkolk — Het is oorlog maar niemand die het ziet (link)
Peter Pomerantsev — This is Not Propaganda (link)
Rob van Essen — De goede zoon (link)
Charles Stross — Accelerando (link)

Self improvement and how-to

The book that has had (by far) the most practical impact on my life is Pastoor’s book about how to get a grip on your work. Although I wasn’t bad to start with, it really helped me to easily accomplish some of the things that I would find difficult in the past. I would truly recommend the book to anybody who wants to accomplish anything. I was ready to hate De Becker’s book, but found that it had some profound insights on how to deal with difficult people (e.g. stalkers). Den Dekker has written a beautiful book about Chi Kung, and if you ever want to go and hitchhike across the ocean on a sailing boat, then I think that Van der Vreeken’s book is required reading.

Rick Pastoor — Grip (link)
Gavin De Becker — The Gift of Fear (link)
Chris Guillebeau — The $100 Startup (link)
Matt Kepnes — How to Travel the World on $50 a Day (link)
Peter den Dekker — The dynamics of standing still (link)
Royal Yachting Association — RYA Competent Crew Skills (link)
Suzanne van der Veeken — Ocean Nomad (link)
Jelmer de Boer — Thuisblijven is duurder (link)
Tom Hodgkinson — Business for Bohemians (link)

Fiction

Once again, I didn’t read a lot of fiction, but the things that I did read were all very good. My mind was completely blown by Marlon James, I absolutely loved his book. Murdoch and Baldwin are both skillful interpreters of the human condition. The graphic novel by Altaribba was completely haunting (and beautiful). If you have young children, get them Tori.

Marlon James — A Brief History of Seven Killings (link)
Iris Murdoch — A Fairly Honourable Defeat (link)
James Baldwin — If Beale Street Could Talk (link)
Antonio Altaribba and Kim — The Art of Flying (link)
Barry Smit — Bloedwonder (link)
Brian Elstak and Karin Amatmoekrim — Tori (link)
Joke van Leeuwen — Toen ik (link)

Non-fiction

Judah wrote a harrowing and brilliant portrait of London. Tolentino is an incredibly talented writer and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her essays. Walker’s book made me change my sleeping habits but also made me understand much better how sleep actually works (so listing it under self-improvement wouldn’t do it justice). Bythell managed to make me laugh out loud on many occasions with his wry diary entries from the frontier of a second hand bookshop. Abdurraqib shares my love for A Tribe Called Quest, which made his book a pleasure to read.

Ben Judah — This is London (link)
Jia Tolentino — Trick Mirror (link)
Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep (link)
Daan Dekker — De betonnen droom (link)
Hanif Abdurraqib — Go Ahead in the Rain (link)
Harry G. Frankfurt — On Inequality (link)
Peter Wohlleben — The Hidden Life of Trees (link)
Shaun Bythell — The Diary of a Bookseller (link)
adrienne maree brown — Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (link)
Mark Traa — De Russen komen! (link)

My consumption of other media

2019 was dedicated to saving as much money as possible (in order to travel for all of 2020). I therefore cancelled all my regular subscriptions to magazines. As The Correspondent’s subscription continued well into 2020, I continued to read their pieces on the basis of their daily newsletter. At the end of the year I took out a subscription to The Economist, mainly for their excellent daily Espresso news app, but also as I way to stay in touch with what is happening with the rest of the world while I am traveling. I continued to read Stephen Downes and Audrey Watters (luckily they continued to write!) and am still subscribed to the Dipsaus newsletter.

The rest of my reading comes via my RSS reader (which I consider to be my personal inoculation against misinformation). I used the reader to read Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, Maxim Februari and Marcel van Roosmalen at the NRC, and Karin Spaink, Caroline Haskins, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Ben Thompson (Stratechery) Linda Duits, Kashmir Hill (until she went to the New York Times), Evgeny Morozov, Ian Bogost, XKCD, Zeynep Tufekci, danah boyd, James Bridle, Matthew Green, and a whole bunch of digital rights organisations. I also read Tweakers and Guardian Tech via their RSS feeds.

Not much has changed for me in podcasting land. I listened to all new episodes of This American Life, Een Podcast over Media, This Week in Tech, Dipsaus, Ear Hustle, 99% Invisible (although I am behind), and Reply-all. Next to that I listened to three interesting series: Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales and two podcasts created by AudioCollectief Schik, namely Laura H. en El Tarangu. When I see an interesting episode I will listen to podcasts by The Correspondent, RadioLab, Glitch, Philsophical Disquisitions, Philosophy Bites, Freakonomics, Philosophy 24/7, New Books in Philosophy, Planet Money, Radio Rechtsstaat, The Tim Ferris Show, Triangulation and Your Undivided Attention.

What will I be reading in 2020?

As I will be traveling for all of 2020, I will likely mostly read books that relate in some way to the country where I am at or to the activity that I am doing. I already know that this will mean reading books about a few places in South America and a few books that are about (long distance) sailing and the sea.

The Books I Read in 2018

At the end of each year, I list the books that I have read during that year. Earlier years were 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012. Below you will find the list of books that I’ve read in 2018. Every year I also include an overview of my other media consumption habits (magazines, RSS feeds and podcasts).

I managed to read one book a week last year, exactly 52 books. The majority of those were read in the latter half of year, when I finished the thesis for my masters in philosophy. There was an increase in the number of books by women that I read (from close to 25% in 2017 to close to 35%), but it still isn’t what I’d like it to be. More than half of the books were written by people who were born in the either the US or UK. However quite a few of those writers do come from a bicultural background.

I’ve ordered the list of books into categories that make sense to me (and that are in many ways overlapping and arbitrary). These are the books that I’ve read and what I thought of some of them:

Digital rights and technology

After reading Gerard I sold most my of meagre Bitcoin holdings, he wrote a thorough debunking of the blockchain concept in general and Bitcoin in particular. Bartlett and Lanier have both made quite radical arguments in two very clearly argued books. Jeong’s concept of ‘garbage’ is a useful way of looking at the shit on some parts of the web. Stephens-Davidowitz makes you realize that Google has more psychological data about people in the world than any other organization ever before. Don’t bother reading Taplin.

David Gerard — Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts (link)
Jamie Bartlett — The People Vs Tech (link)
Jaron Lanier — Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (link)
Sarah Jeong — The Internet Of Garbage (link)
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz — Everybody Lies (link)
Yuval Noah Harari — 21 lessen voor de 21ste eeuw (link)
Jonathan Taplin — Move Fast and Break Things (link)
Safiya Umoja Noble — Algorithms of Oppression (link)

Justice, ethics and identity

I had the privilege of being able to invest a whole week into reading Rawls’s masterpiece. To me he is the model of how one should do philosophy. Pettit’s ideas are more appealing to me though, and this book is a great summary of his thoughts on civic republicanism. Appiah has written a definitive guide to identity in the current moment. Macfarquhar’s book is a wonderful introduction to age-old ethical dilemmas through stories of lived experiences. Qureshi should be read by anyone who wants to understand more about the current plight of Muslims in the UK.

John Rawls — A Theory of Justice (link)
Philip Pettit — Just Freedom (link)
Kwame Anthony Appiah — The Lies That Bind (link)
Larissa Macfarquhar — Strangers Drowning (link)
Asim Qureshi — A Virtue Of Disobedience (link)
Reni Eddo-Lodge — Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (link)

B00k C7ub 4 N3rd$

The book club was back in full effect last year. Unfortunately with plenty of middle of the road books. Bridle was the exception and brought the mindset of an artist to our technological predicament. I now also understand why Harari is such a bestseller: the man can write. The corporate take-over in Magnason’s near fiction novel will stay with me for a while longer. Nagle wrote the most intelligent thing I’ve read all year about the ‘culture wars’. Schneier’s book is a good overview of where we are at when it come to securing the internet of things.

James Bridle — New Dark Age (link)
Yuval Noah Harari — Homo Deus (link)
Andri Magnason — Lovestar (link)
Angela Nagle — Kill All Normies (link)
Bruce Schneier — Click Here to Kill Everybody (link)
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith — The Dictator’s Handbook (link)
Fred Kaplan — Dark Territory (link)
Jean M. Twenge — iGen (link)
Ryan Holiday — Conspiracy (link)

Self improvement and how-to

Books that teach you new skills can have an incredible influence on your daily or professional life. Parker’s book on how to run gatherings (a place where people come together to do something) might have been my favorite book of the year. She really nailed it. Carroll has managed to change my productivity-practice: I used to have all my todos online, now I’ve switched back to paper.

Priya Parker — The Art of Gathering (link)
Ryder Carroll — The Bullet Journal Method (link)
Eva Rovers — Practivisme (link)
Juana Clark Craig — Project Management Lite (link)
Michelle McGagh — The No Spend Year (link)
Caroline van der Velde — Oudergids autisme (link)
Rolf Potts — Vagabonding (link)

Fiction

Wow, I’ve read some wonderful fiction this year. All of the below come recommended. Neale Hurston was incredible and Ross was weirdly hilarious. Didion writes beautiful prose and I couldn’t stop reading Isik and his coming of age in the Bijlmer.

Zora Neale Hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God (link)
Fran Ross — Oreo (link)
Joan Didion — The Year of Magical Thinking (link)
Murat Isik — Wees onzichtbaar (link)
Chibundu Onuzo — Welcome to Lagos (link)
Barry Smit — Ondijk/Punt (link)
Vamba Sherif and Ebissé Rouw — Zwart (link)

While traveling in Mexico, I read these three pieces of excellent writing by current Mexican writers. Luiselli was my favourite.

Valeria Luiselli — The Story of My Teeth (link)
Yuri Herrera — Transmigration of Bodies (link)
Juan Pablo Villalobos — Quesadillas (link)

Graphic novels and art

I loved Elstak en Duysker’s children’s book, mainly because of its bold graphics. The novel by Drnaso was haunting and made me feel empty inside afterward. Dalí is ever the prankster, and I look forward to reading the following chapters in Sattouf’s life.

Brian Elstak and Esther Duysker — Trobi (link)
Nick Drnaso — Sabrina (link)
Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman — Dali’s Mustache (link)
Riad Sattouf — The Arab of the Future (link)
Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam — Explosiegevaar! (link)

Non-fiction

I was mesmerized by Godfrey-Smith’s book about octopuses, which turned out to be insightful look at consciousness and at our own minds. Beerthuizen’s book had some good examples of how organizations managed to find business sponsors for their activities. The two museum catalogues were both worth the read. Hislop and Hockenbull’s book was actually better than the exhibit at the British Museum, which can’t be said about the book about the National Museum of Anthropology (even though it was excellent). Taleb both infuriated me (more so than with his earlier books), but also made me think. Wallman should have just done a TED-talk, his premise is interesting but too thin for a book.

Peter Godfrey-Smith — Other Minds (link)
Marcel Beerthuizen — Show me the money (link)
Ian Hislop and Tom Hockenhull — I object (link)
Mónica del Villar — 100 Selected Works: National Museum of Anthropology (link)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Skin in the game (link)
Catherine Ingram and Andrew Rae — This is Dalí (link)
James Wallman — Stuffocation (link)

My consumption of other media

My media consumption looks very similar to last year’s. I am subscribed to De Correspondent, Het Parool, Wired Magazine and the New York Review of Books. I get three newsletters: the OLDaily by Stephen Downes, the weekly newsletter by Audrey Watters, and whenever Dipsaus sends out one. Outside of these I get most of my news through my self-hosted RSS reader. I read a few people diligently: Kashmir Hill, Evgeny Morozov, Cory Doctorow, Cathy O’Neil, Karin Spaink, Jaap-Henk Hoepman, and Linda Duits. I wish there was a way for me to receive the columns of Maxim Februari and Sheila Sitalsing in my inbox. The only web-comic I read is XKCD. For other news, I read The Intercept (which is getting better again), Wired Security, Guardian Tech and Tweakers. For work I follow most digital rights organizations, Pricacy Nieuws and Privacy Barometer.

I still listen to a lot of podcasts: Every episode of Reply All, This American Life, Dipsaus, Ear Hustle, This Week in Tech, Een Podcast over Media, and Strangers (which is on a very long hiatus). New is Goed Nieuws with Joris Luyendijk. If I have time, or if the show looks particularly appealing, I listen to Radio Rechtsstaat, 99% Invisible, The Most Perfect Album, RadioLab, Pakhuis de Zwijger, Freakonomics Radio, Intercepted, The Guardian Long Read, Triangulation, and sometimes even the Tim Ferris Show.

What will I be reading in 2019?

Outside of the books that I will have to read for my job as the director of Bits of Freedom and the books that I will read with the book club, I will try and read the books that I have already bought and haven’t read yet. So that would be this list. Next to an attempt to read more fiction, I will also read some foundational texts in ethics (probably through anthologies).

Freedom and Justice in our Technological Predicament

This is the thesis I wrote for my Master of Arts in philosophy.
It can also be dowloaded as a PDF.

Introduction

As the director of an NGO advocating for digital rights I am acutely aware of the digital trail we leave behind in our daily lives. But I too am occasionally surprised when I am confronted with concrete examples of this trail. Like when I logged into my Vodafone account (my mobile telephony provider) and—buried deep down in the privacy settings—found a selected option that said: “Ik stel mijn geanonimiseerde netwerkgegevens beschikbaar voor analyse.”¹ I turned the option off and contacted Vodafone to ask them what was meant by anonymized network data analysis. They cordially hosted me at their Amsterdam offices and showed me how my movement behaviour was turned into a product by one of their joint ventures, Mezuro:

Smartphones communicate continuously with broadcasting masts in the vicinity. The billions of items of data provided by these interactions are anonymized and aggregated by the mobile network operator in its own IT environment and made available to Mezuro for processing and analysis. The result is information about mobility patterns of people, as a snapshot or trend analysis, in the form of a report or in an information system.²

TNO had certified this process and confirmed that privacy was assured: Mezuro has no access into the mobility information of individual people. From their website: “While of mobility patterns is of great social value, as far as we’re concerned it is certainly not more valuable than protecting the privacy of the individual.”³

Intuitively something about Vodafone’s behavior felt wrong to me, but I found it hard to articulate why what Vodafone was doing was problematic. This thesis is an attempt to find reasons and arguments that explain my growing sense of discomfort. It will show that Vodafone’s behavior is symptomatic for our current relationship with technology: it operates at a tremendous scale, it reuses data to turn it into new products and it feels empowered to do this without checking with their customers first.

The main research question of this thesis is how the most salient aspects of our technological predicament affect both justice as fairness and freedom as non-domination.

The research consists of three parts. In the first part I will look at the current situation to understand what is going on. By taking a closer look at the emerging logic of our digitizing society I will show how mediation, accumulation and centralization shape our technological predicament. This predicament turns out to be one where technology companies have a domineering scale, where they employ a form of data-driven appropriation and where our relationship with the technology is asymmetrical and puts us at the receiving end of arbitrary control. A set of four case studies based on Google’s products and services deepens and concretizes this understanding of our technological predicament.

In the second part of the thesis I will use the normative frameworks of John Rawls’s justice as fairness and Philip Pettit’s freedom as non-domination to problematize this technological predicament. I will show how data-driven appropriation leads to injustice through a lack of equality, the abuse of the commons, and a mistaken utilitarian ethics. And I will show how the domineering scale and our asymmetrical relationship to the technology sector leads to unfreedom through our increased vulnerability to manipulation, through our dependence on philanthropy, and through the arbitrary control that technology companies exert on us.

In the third and final part I will take a short and speculative look at what should be done to get us out of this technological predicament. Is it possible to reduce the scale at which technology operates? Can we reinvigorate the commons? And how should we build equality into our technology relationships?

Continue reading “Freedom and Justice in our Technological Predicament” →

Turnitin User Agreement: I disagree

For the past one and a half year or so I’ve been studying Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Today I wanted to hand in my very first and very tentative ideas about my Master’s thesis. Using the archaic, mindnumbing, and Repetitive Strain Injury-inducing Blackboard digital learning environment I was confronted with the following screen:

I have better things to do than read the whole text (~ 5.100 words) but I did read enough to know that I couldn’t agree with this User Agreement. Instead I decided to write this blog post explaining what I find so disagreeable.

But first, what is Turnitin? It is the market leader (although monopolist is probably the better term) in plagiarism detection services. They have a few hundred million student submissions in their database. So when a new submission comes in they check it against the web (Wikipedia is plagiarism source number one) and against the submissions they already have and presumably give out a plagiarism score or percentage (I am not privy to that part of the interface).

The User Agreement

The terms of service of many companies can often be best summarised as: “We can do whatever we want, you can’t expect anything from us and, even though this agreement already gives you zero rights into perpetuity, we still reserve the right to change this agreement at our will without telling you.”

Turnitin’s terms closely follow that general pattern. Let me quote you some relevant passages. All emphasis is mine.

Let’s start with the good: They acknowledge that you keep ownership over your work:

You or the person who has authorized You to submit a paper for review as part of the Services will, subject to the license granted hereunder to Turnitin and its affiliates, vendors, service providers and licensors, retain Your ownership of the submitted paper. This User Agreement grants Turnitin and its affiliates, vendors, service providers and licensors only a non-exclusive right to Your paper solely for the purposes of plagiarism prevention and the other Services provided as part of Turnitin.

What does retaining ownership actually mean? Not much, because by agreeing with Agreement you completely lose control of your work. This is because you give Turnitin a license:

If You submit a paper or other content in connection with the Services, You hereby grant to Turnitin, its affiliates, vendors, service providers, and licensors a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to use such papers, as well as feedback and results, for the limited purposes of a) providing the Services, and b) for improving the quality of the Services generally.

And the license is very broad: it will last forever, counts everywhere and is not just for Turnitin but also for anybody they have dealings with. The text does say that the license is limited for the purposes of providing the services. The problem is that these services are in themselves not limited. The services are defined as follows:

The Site offers certain services, together with other content, data, images, information and other materials which allow authorized educational institutions (“Educational Institutions”), and teachers, instructors, professors or other faculty members who are currently teaching a registered class (together, “Instructors”) to use software tools hosted by Turnitin to check enrolled students’ work for possible textual matches against Internet-available resources and Turnitin’s own proprietary database.

But it then also says:

You acknowledge and agree that the form and nature of the Services and the Site which Turnitin provides may change from time to time without prior notice to You.

So there we have it: If you agree to the User Agreement you have just given Turnitin (and its partners) permission to use your paper for any service and at any point in the time in the future.

And even though you have not limited them in any way, they still want to make sure that you agree with them changing the rules whenever they want:

Turnitin, LLC reserves the right to change the terms, conditions, and notices under which the Site is offered.

What needs to change before I will agree

Whether or not it make sense for a university to use a plagiarism detection service is outside of the scope of this blog post. And so is a discussion about what constitutes plagiarism. So assuming the University of Amsterdam will continue to want to check whether I have plagiarized, I will list my conditions before I can agree to the User Agreement. These are as follows:

My work can only be used by Turnitin to check for plagiarism.
As I see no reason for it being my responsibility to help Turnitin get better at doing their job (by giving them the ability to recognise when somebody plagiarizes my work), I want Turnitin to delete my work as soon as the check has been done.
If Turnitin relies on third parties to do the plagiarism check, then I would need a limitative list of these parties and the assurance that the above two conditions will also count for them.

Until my conditions are satisfied I will not be using Turnitin to hand in any of my work at the university. And I am pretty confident that in this case my principles will be stronger than my pragmatism. Let’s see what happens next…

Update on January 16th, 2018: Folia, the university’s magazine, published an article about this issue. In it, the university says they will look into it and Turnitin has given a ludicrous reaction. My teachers for this course have said that I can hand in all my assignments via email. I’ve asked the university to keep me posted.