Did you agree to the Terms of Service?
You probably did.

The countless click-and-agree-contracts populating the Web are veritable gate keepers of the gated communities making up todays Web 2.0 net culture. You need to agree in order to get access to a given service, but did you actually ever take the time to read through any of these contracts?

As an artistic intervention Gate peepin' allows its users a peep into the otherwise not so accessible layers of regulations governing the use of so called democratic web-spaces.

Gate peepin' is a Firefox extension that compares the Terms of Service document with the text content of a site and re-edits it by inserting phrases from the regulations. This process is triggered by matching "common words" present both in the ToS document and in the user generated content.

Thus, by re-editing the user generated content Gate peepin' alters the browsing experience of different Web 2.0-platforms according to the ToS regulating the service. This leads to rather absurd meanings and phrases, where both the user generated content and the ToS are turned upside down. When using Gate peepin' it is possible to filter the inserted ToS-phrases by using existing filters or creating ones own filter when looking for something specific. Gate peepin also makes a small peep summary of the specific key phrases and an indication of how long time it would take to read the ToS governing the visited site.

The Internet services of Web 2.0 are acting as community platforms for users to engage and participate in the creation and development of content. In this way new kinds of private-public spaces are appearing, spaces which are supposedly democratic i.e. created and controlled by the users as suggested by the companies with tag-lines like 'Second Life - Your World. Your Imagination.' or names such as 'YouTube' or Myspace', but at the same time spaces where the means of control are non-transparent and users rights hardly exist if any.

Each service platform defines its own regulative framework. This makes browsing the net a continuous travel between territories of different regulations, like a landscape of gated communities, where the regulations, however, are invisible.