What if we in writing had to authorize phone companies to listen to our calls, in order to have access to phones?

Brooke Masters writes: “when I link our Amazon Echo speaker to my son’s Spotify account, I have no idea whether I am violating one of the thousands of terms and conditions he agreed to with his account. Furthermore, does that act give Amazon the right to send him advertisements based on the songs we play?” “Take ownership of the sharing economy” December 29.

She is absolutely right. The rights we seem to have to give up in order to gain access to social media and alike, though defined in small letters in thousands of unreadable pages, is one of the most undefined issues of our time.

Some questions:

Should the marginal cost for social media owners to access, and waste, so much of our limited attention span, be zero?

Should we be able to copyright our own preferences so that we at least can have something to negotiate with?

How much can we allow being distracted during working hours before our employer has the right to deduct our salaries paid?

How will such working hours distractions be accounted for in employment statistics?

How is all this free or very cheap consumption paid by used attention spans be accounted for, for instance in GNP figures?

Should social media owners be allowed to impose their own rules or should that not be subject to some kind of a special arbitration panel?

How our global differences be managed? Does a government that interferes with its citizens’ rights of access to social media have access to other web sites of other nations?

@PerKurowski