Methods and Results 1. Legal Document Analysis

To access the outlined media services, end-users absolutely need to accept user agree-ments and terms. Usually a simple touch-click will do the job, but the actual content of the agreement will take some time to be found. With slight variation according to the nature of specific media, almost all of these legal documents share the following three main features.

• General characteristics: Simply by clicking ‘agree’ or by using the service, the end-user is bound to the legal confinement composed by the service pro-vider. The majority of end-users click the accept bottom without reading the agreement content (though it usually is suggested with italic or caption letters under the ‘agree’). Besides, these agreements are lengthy, averaging twenty pages in A4 paper font size 12. The language is often difficult to understand for common end-users, due to many specialized legal and technical terms. In most cases, it seems that the end-user is left without any other choice but to click ‘agree’. Otherwise the service is not available. Often there is no room to negotiate the terms, such as to accept partially or simply to give feedback.

• Personal data collecting: Most legal documents declare that it is optional for end-users to provide detailed personal information and to allow the service provider to share with third parties. However, service providers often oblige end-users to agree to their personal data and usage record being collected. The excuse is to “improve their future service and technology”. The collected data mostly are set to be shared automatically by the service providers with their related business entities and become part of the service providers’ property.

They are sellable and transferable once the business is sold to or merged with other companies.

• Responsibility avoidance: In most of the terms and user agreements, it is announced clearly that the service providers do not guarantee any techni-cal reliability for safeguarding the uploaded contents by end-users. End-users shall take full responsibility to back up whatever is uploaded to the service provider’s cloud. Moreover, in case of any security or legal concern raised, the service providers do not take any responsibility because they do not control or

monitor their users’ activities and communications. End-users are advised to take measurement and be responsible for the public information s/he exposes.

Nevertheless, even if certain information is set as private, they are still possible to be found by a search engine such as Google. To click the delete button does not guarantee the opted information will be deleted. In any case, all these legal documents have made very clear that whatever happens, it is not the respon-sibility of a service provider but of the end-user him/herself.

Generally speaking, all these terms and user agreements of media services do not mention anything about which cloud service they are employing on the back stage.

According to some market surveys, by far the media companies either build their own cloud services or they buy it from a third party, e.g., Amazon or Google. In any case, the end-users are not informed about the existence of the cloud behind the media company in any of these documents. Therefore, they are not aware of the fact that actually they are facing double risks when the media services move to the cloud, as the terms and user agreements between the media companies and the cloud service providers are usually similar to the one between the end-user and the media service provider.

4.2.2. Content Analysis of Websites and Mobile Applications Table In addition to the legal documents’ analysis, we also needed to gather insights and comparable data from both of the case companies’ websites, as well as their mobile applications (if they had one). We developed a two-fold test that allowed us to com-pare the types of services provided by the companies, as well as to measure the ease with which one could find the documents concerning privacy and terms of use.

The empirical research is based on our subjective assessment of various metrics (for details, see Appendix). In our measurement system, we observed each case according to the availability of information, such as the terms of use of the media’s services and the ease with which the information was discovered. For the purpose of the research, service personalization consisted of the possibility to register for the media’s service, the need to sign or log in, the possibility of signing up with a social media account such as Facebook and the option of utilizing the company’s service without providing personal information.

When measuring the service personalization, consisting of metrics such as the op-tion of signing up for the service with one’s Facebook account, we found that on average, Spotify’s website provided the easiest access. In comparison, the website of NBC provided few options for signing up or accessing any user information. In our assessment of the website’s information that is relevant for the end-user, we found that NBC and YouTube provided the necessary information, for example, on privacy, in comparison to Twitter’s mobile application which demanded more searching in order to find the privacy documents and terms of usage. NBC and YouTube had the easiest website structure, with the least clicks (See Appendix for charts of the case companies).

4.2.3. Three Personas’ Media Consumption Habits

In this section, we reflect on our findings from the observations made on the web-sites, on the mobile applications, as well as in the legal documents (i.e., service agree-ments) of the case companies. To reflect possible use cases, the consumption habits of Franck, Emma, and Hank introduced in section 3 are evaluated by imagining their media consumption in relation to each case discussed in the case section. This is done, by examining the ways in which Franck, Emma and Hank would use the media services and which sorts of pros and cons their media consumption potentially includes.

To identify potential differences between the user persona’s consumption habits, the user’s plausible consumption activity was graded on a five-number scale, where 1

= never tried it, 2 = once, 3 = monthly or less, 4 = weekly, and 5 = daily. The grades are based on the writers’ perceptions of Franck, Emma and Hank’s personas.

Franck has tried each of the case media services, but, more regularly, he consumes only services such as YouTube and NBC, both of which do not require a user ac-count, nor do they enable content creation. Emma consumes all the case media for-mats on a weekly or daily basis for entertainment purposes, but she does not create her own content. She is an active follower and provides her personal information to media companies such as Twitter, Spotify, iCloud and WeChat in order to get full access to entertainment, but also utilizes the services that do not require a user ac-count. Hank utilizes mainly Twitter, Spotify, iCloud, WeChat and YouTube, because they allow him to customize and create his own content and share it in an integrated manner with his friends and business contacts by providing his personal data. He does not by and large utilize passive services where he cannot interact either with people or with the content.

As Franck pays attention to where he provides his information, his social media service utilization is limited. Thus, for Franck media formats such as NBC, YouTube, and Sonera Viihde are useful because they allow content consumption without hav-ing to log in, or to have a user account. On the other hand, he easily gets excluded from social circles and networks and does not have access to all information of ser-vices such as Spotify, Twitter, iCloud and WeChat.

Emma loves to consume entertainment and follow topical phenomena, and there-fore she is more than happy to provide her information to media such as Spotify, Twitter, iCloud, and Sonera Viihde if she gets access to more entertainment. Also, more traditional formats such as NBC offer her advantages, as she does not want to create content herself but rather consume that of others. The possible disadvantages relate mostly to Emma’s unawareness of where and whom the information she pro-vides is given to and what her rights are if something unpredictable happens. She also tends to become addicted to television series and can accidentally spend a whole weekend watching a whole season of a TV series. She also is quite clueless about how much money she spends on renting movies online, which is why she might get into economical problems.

For Hank, the new types of media services such as Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify are advantageous. These media enable him to find similar-minded people and ex-change ideas globally with the people interested in the same phenomena. YouTube and Twitter also allow him to create his own content and show what he is interested in, linking him with the global tribes. He finds the more traditional media such as NBC and Sonera Entertainment inflexible and too fixed, as they are not straightly connected to the social media or his personal data. The possible disadvantages relate to his openly shared user profiles, pictures and private information and a lack of privacy.

To conclude, Franck, Emma and Hank consume media in a variety of ways for a myriad of purposes. This is why potential positive and negative impacts deriving from the consumption vary significantly. On the one hand, the advantages scale from Franck’s free time and worriless mind through Emma’s ability to consume all the en-tertainment in the world to Hank’s abilities to find extensive networks and exchange thoughts globally. On the other hand, the disadvantages vary from Franck’s possible social isolation, through Emma’s addiction and personal data acquisition, to Hank’s privacy loss and potentially siloed view of the world.

5. Scenarios