Zachary Trostle

Professor Melina Probst

English 1101
12/3/15
The Misinformed Farmer
Being a farmer can be a very lonely lifestyle, you are constantly
working on the field and maintaining your land. You work from dawn and stop
when the sun starts to set, it is very hard to have a social life and even if you
wanted to go somewhere it would be a very long drive to somewhere in
which you can interact with other people. In this scenario a very hard
working young farmer wants to have a social life but has no outlet that is
easily accessible to do so. After browsing the web he finds a website called
Farmers Unite. Farmers Unite is a dating site run by Daters Unite, the
company tries to give hard working farmers who live the farming lifestyle a
chance to meet new friends and partners.
Joe Jeffries a Illinois rural farmer in his young 20s decided he wanted
to give this website a shot in the hopes of meeting a girl that shared and
respected his lifestyle. Joe joins the website in which it asks him personal
questions such as: political views, religious views, height, weight, education,
hobbies and gross income. Answering these questions Joe mostly told the
truth except about his height and gross income. Before activating his

account and the site charging his credit card, the site asks if you should
accept its terms of service. Joe did not fully read these terms and conditions
and skimmed through them and skipped this step. The terms of service
clearly states that the information may be shared with a third party. After he
got a match with a girl who searched him on Google found out that he was a
janitor and t a not an actual farmer left Joe feeling sad and also upset that
the site let a picture that he only shared with them was released on the
Internet for all of the world to see, Joe sent an e-mail to Farmers Unite in
which he received a refund. Later on after moving on from this incident Joe
receives notice from the IRS stating that Joe is accused of Fraud. The IRS saw
that Joe changed his gross income on the Farmers Unite questionnaire now
Joe believes that his privacy was infringed and plans to sue Farmers Unite for
this.
If Joe Jeffries were to sue I believe he would not win the case. Joe made
some mistakes that completely destroyed his reputation. However he
shouldnt be guilty for the penalty of Fraud since he changed his gross
income on the questionnaire just to see if he can hook up with more ladies
instead of actually lying about his gross income with the IRS. Some of the
mistakes Joe made was he did not read the terms of service of the
agreement that if he did read those terms of service he would have known
that a third party can and has access to all the members and that third party
was the IRS. Another mistake that he made was he lied about his personal
info which at some time in the future will come around and get you in which

it did with this girl he was trying to meet and she ended up cutting ties with
him. In class we discussed many different authors who had different
viewpoints about privacy some that would agree with me and some that
wouldnt, I will share a couple of these authors who either agree with my
stance or dont.
One author that would agree with me is an author named Sherry
Turkle. In her essay How Computers Change the Way We Think, Turkle states
that and Im paraphrasing That my generation has come to terms that they
are used to government surveying us and we think of privacy as a privilege
and not as a right (Turkle page 2). Turkle is saying here that the youngest
generation especially but most people nowadays dont understand how
much of their privacy is out for the world to see and what they do online is
not just kept to them and their laptop. Everything is monitored by the
government and the younger generation just accepts this as part of their
lives because they grew up in the time of advancing technology and
computers replacing libraries and books. So when we go online we dont
think twice about posting confidential information because most people
believe that it is lost in the abyss after we shut down our computer or close
the tab in which case its not. In Joes case, he did not read the terms of
conditions and he just thought the information would be kept to the site and
just the site. Another problem that Turkle would agree with me and she
states in her essay, that technology has made a lot of people very lazy and
they wont even bother reading everything that a page or a prompt that the

Internet throws at you. Joe just skipped the terms of service section because
he probably didnt care about it and just wanted to create his profile so he
can meet some girls, and he probably didnt think that it mattered because it
would all be kept confidential to the site.
Another author that agrees with me is Adam Gopnick. In his essay How
The Internet Gets Inside Us, he states that all technologies that provide
information went through the same fight that the Internet is going through
now. Everyone complained about what the new information technologies
were doing to our minds, Books produced a restless, fractured attention.
Pamphlets and poems were breaking kids ability to concentrate. (Para. 23)
In the final two paragraphs Gopnick states that The peril isnt that users
lose their knowledge of the world. Its that we they can lose all sense of
proportion. Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our
Contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that
makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. (Paragraphs 32 and 33).
And what he is saying there is the Internet itself is not a tool for evil it is just
something that provides us information like books and television everyone
was criticizing it for taking over peoples lives. You as a person have to
understand that these are devices that are supposed to help your life by
making it more convenient; however you also have to be careful because you
can get lost in the internet. And it is not a place that is completely secure
and you shouldnt put your personal information on there or false information

because someone may be watching and that is the mistake that Joe made
and is now paying the price for.
Now for the counter-argument, people that believe Joe Jeffries is not to
blame but the Internet itself. With what Gopnick said that the Internet is a
device that we use to gather information. It is not a person that has ethical
values; it is just a place where data is stored by the users and the companies
and people that run websites. People are evil, the internet itself is not. With
that being said people are on the Internet and you cannot take your privacy
for granted and just post personal information without the possible
consequence that someone will take that information to use it against you
and ruin your reputation. In Joe Jeffries case he was careless and lied about
his personality in which he gave consent to Farmers Unite to take his
information and let third parties have access to that particular information.
He also lied about himself on a dating site, which eventually would come
around and get him. He lost the possible relationship with this girl because
he lied.
In conclusion Joe Jeffries is at fault for his mistakes. Joe should not win
the case if he decides to sue Daters Unite (Farmers Unite) for his lack of not
being mindful of what he was doing on the website. He needs to be more
careful with his use of the internet. He needs to be truthful of what he puts
on there so a similar incident with the IRS wont happen again. Joe needs to
also understand that he has to be careful on the Internet, he needs to know

what he is getting into when signing an agreement and be mindful that its
not just a page that he wants access to it could be his reputation on the line.