Black Mirror returned last week with an episode where the villain was directly Netflix. Well, technically, the character of Joan (Annie Murphy) had a contract with a streaming service called Streamberry but both her appearance (with the red letters) and the sound of the application (which replicated that characteristic “tudum!”) made it possible to think that that platform was actually Netflix. And Joan, one fine day, found in the catalog a title called Joan is Terrible with Salma Hayek playing her less friendly face. What content can be more personalized than a series produced treacherously and inspired by the life of the service subscriber?
At Netflix, comfortable with the idea of ??being portrayed as the bad guys in history, they have decided to have fun with this new image. This is how they have enabled a Streamberry portal where users can upload a photograph of themselves to create the cover of their own series. The grace of the matter? That later Netflix can make use of these generated images and use this material for the promotion of Black Mirror. The viewer can find her face on the internet just like Joan. You can even use that image for actual billboards.
Social networks, of course, are now filled with users who upload the cover of their own fictional series or those who have been lucky enough to find their billboard. But those interested must take into account one detail: what does it mean to transfer the image to Netflix through this portal called Streamberry. And it is that, as the Catalan actress Bea Segura, who had a role in the episode, warned, we usually accept the default conditions and you never know what you are committing to: “You usually accept because you are too lazy to read all those paragraphs and clicks without thinking about the consequences”.
For example, there is the box “I consent to Netflix using my image for its marketing campaign” but there is also another privacy conditions with much more text. What does it mean to accept that box? That the web will save information such as identifiers in social networks, email, IP, any type of visual, audio, electronic or sensory information and geolocation.
“By interacting with this Experience, you grant the Netflix entity (…) the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide and non-exclusive right, but not the obligation, to register, represent, portray and/or use your real or simulated image, name, photograph, voice, action, etc., in connection with the development, production, distribution, exploitation, publicity, promotion, and publicity of this Experience, in all media now known and subsequently developed, and all languages, formats, versions, and forms”, indicate those paragraphs.
It is, therefore, an immersive experience. The user can get a poster as a gift but, in reality, the fun is in signing conditions as hellish as those of Joan in the critically acclaimed episode.
