So you don’t read online services’ user contracts and privacy policies? We don’t blame you – there’s one where it will take you 90 minutes
- Reboot Online Marketing tabulated how much time it’d take to read the terms of service and privacy policies of leading social media and e-commerce companies
- Not only are they long, but, with lawyers involved, use language you wouldn’t see even in a scientific journal. No wonder so few of us read them. But we should
If you’re like most people, you don’t bother to read the user contracts and privacy policies that accompany all those “free” services you enjoy online – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest.
You should – but Big Tech seems to go out of its way to prevent you from understanding what you’re agreeing to when you sign up for a service.
These companies often make it as hard as possible to know what personal data is being collected and how it is being used, how extensively your online activities are being monitored, and what your legal rights may be (or may not be) in case of trouble.
“Businesses know their terms are unreadable by, and incomprehensible to, consumers,” says Lauren Willis, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles.
Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, in California, says it takes a “substantial” amount of time for anyone to traverse tech companies’ user agreements, let alone fully understand them.
