I’m not in a position, nor do I have the skills, to fully validate exactly what I’m agreeing to. Let us assume that what I’m sharing is merely my app usage data: what I listen to, my likes, follows, comments, usage patterns, etc.
They share this data with 954 “partners” - what exactly does this mean? What other data do those organisations have? Who do they share it with?
I don’t think the average user has any chance of fully understanding what they’re agreeing to.
There is a difference when you simply lazy, or don’t care enough to understand the information in front of you, or when they don’t provide those information. You’re right, most people don’t care enough, but this is a huge difference. And west is magnitudes better with this.
Also I’m living in the EU. If I want I can get all of the information which you asked for.
But on the other hand, companies purposefully make those information as obscure as possible. Also, I’m not sure that people would care even if it had been clear. People love free stuffs.
I'm not sure why "954 partners" is surprising: log10(954) is between 2 and 3 so, if you assume Soundcloud uses at least 10 SaaS products to manage data (AWS, Snowflake, Datadog, etc. this number is definitely a low estimate). And then you assume each of those entities process the data through 10 partners of various kinds, it only takes 3 steps out to get 1,000.
It's very different from:
> ps aux # Every running process with full arguments
If you think these two cases are even remotely comparable, I don't know what to tell you.