A tiny percentage (less than 1%) [0]of people read terms and conditions- they are long, repetitive and often in legal language. If you expect to read every terms and conditions and privacy policy (and every change there of), you would waste over 240 hours over the year.[1]
[0] Bakos, Y., Marotta-Wurgler, F. and Trossen, D. R. (2014) ‘Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts’, The Journal of Legal Studies, 43(1), pp. 1–35. doi: 10.1086/674424.
[1] McDonald, A. M. and Cranor, L. F. (2008) ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 4(3), pp. 543–568.
Fair; but my point is more-so, if there was a Page 27 at the end that inserted some unusual terms, it'd be really obvious because it wouldn't look like all the templated stuff before it, and anyone reasonable would catch it. Its also a lot less tiring to read through those preceding 26 pages because its all templated, and you're really just reading the custom notes and checkboxes and such.
I don't feel its unreasonable to read through a dozen or two pages of contracts for something like a rental lease that will eat up 30% of your income for the next year; and I've never felt that my city/state is in dire need of improving the situation. The problem with online service terms is more-so that: they aren't standardized, they all say different things, they oftentimes claim things that aren't legally enforceable, they're usually a UI afterthought... they're just bad. We do need some kind of legislation for those. I don't feel that requiring a summary is the answer.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/may/11/terms-condition...
The author cites from the above-linked study that 58% of adults surveyed in 2011 would rather read an instruction manual or credit card bill than online terms and conditions. (I wish that study had clarified whether they had surveyed an equal number of men and women.) That link amongst almost every you read regarding reading contracts and whatnot always advocate reading through word for word, and making sure you understand everything. Two things prohibit this - time and ease of comprehension. If companies could bullet point, we'd all be able to get through it within a reasonable amount of time. Those bullet points would hopefully simplify the language and make clear for those who cite "difficult to understand" as the reason for why they don't read through terms and conditions. I imagine some might need to contact legal counsel for explanations every time they want to sign up for internet, use a new application, or even browse a website. These fees would be quite costly, and it is arguable that the total damages associated with failure to reading terms and conditions would not outweigh the expenditure for ensuring clarity and comprehension through legal counsel. However, despite the theoretical advocacy for thorough reading, companies do not actually want us to do this. If they did, I believe they would make it easier. Lawyers like convoluting things; they like leaving loopholes, and making language just abstruse and ill-constructed enough to deter even the most erudite from fully reading anything they've written. (I sound like I hate lawyers, but I don't. I took the LSAT's thinking maybe I would like to go to law school to learn that school of thought. But I digress…)
The article about the Londoners is just sad all around. Are they to blame? Are the companies writing these wandering tomes of terms and conditions? Surely there has to be a better way to outlay and convey the constructs of these user agreements.
If we are to add a law here, I think it may make sense to require contracts to be easy to understand and as short as is reasonable. I think it's pretty reasonable for someone to skim over fine print especially for something that seems obvious.
Something like a safe deposit box should be a single page document with something like this:
- cost is $X/month and prices are revaluated every Y months and can increase by a maximum of $Z/month
- may access the box X times/month without any additional fees
- bank's liability is max $X or Y months of rent, whichever is higher/lower
- if rent is not paid, X happens, and after Y months of non-payment, Z happens
- policy/fee for lost keys
I haven't actually opened one, but I wouldn't be surprised if the contract was 10 pages long and the maximum liability was somewhere in the middle in fairly small print.
We need regulation around this sooo bad. Nobody reads TOS, or at least 99.9999% of people don't because it's simply too much. It's unreasonable to expect people to read these long documents and understand what they mean. We need requirements of high-level overviews in very plain language. Slimming this stuff down and removing BS lawyer fluff is the only way in my eyes.
How about a law that requires the party presenting legal paperwork to show that the recipient could have read the document. Use an algorithmic method to estimate the reading time, take off ~33% to account for variance in reading ability, and declare that the minimum time that must be spent with the document.
If you cannot show that e.g. someone clicked "I Agree" at lest 5 minutes (or whatever) after they received the ToS text, then the court will assume prima facie that the have not read the ToS and are not responsible for anything in it. The friction this would add to the checkout/signup process grows with the document size, creating an incentive to write short and simple ToS.
People complain about the incomprehensible legalese in terms of service all the time. Here you are complaining about a lack of legalese. Shows you why people just stick with the unreadable nonsense.
These things are intentionally made unreadable though. I'd be surprised if even people that spend a lot of time reading and encountering legal terms could sit through one unless they were trying to do something unusual and what to cover themselves.
I don't know that it's about reading comprehension. I think most consumers could understand them if they put the effort in.
The problem is simply that people don't read this stuff in the first place. They simply sign without reading, assuming/hoping/praying that the terms are reasonable.
And really, can you blame them? Contracts are so vastly overused and they're made with the assumption that the consumer isn't going to read them. Most companies won't give you a two-page contract if a twenty-page contract will do. Many contracts are excessively long and are part of a sales process built on speed that assumes nobody will take the time to read before signing.
I would like to see a change in how contracts are handled, such that if one side knows the other side didn't read before signing, the contract is void. That wouldn't take care of everything (American Express's contract is probably handled by mail, so they can reasonably expect you to read the contract at leisure in your home before you sign) but it would put a stop to abusive situations in retail, where they had you a bunch of paperwork to sign. If they had to actually watch you and make sure you read it all before signing, the contracts would probably become a lot shorter. If people got used to reading the things, then it might even change their habits for other scenarios like doing stuff through the mail.
However, I also think it is completely insane that contracts are allowed to put any restrictions on either party's access to courts. The whole point of courts is to be the arbiter when something goes wrong. A clause saying that you must use some third-party arbitration service instead of the courts, or a clause saying that you agree not to participate in class-action lawsuits, should be completely unenforceable, just like a clause that says you agree to become the other party's slave.
Ah this is another case of people not reading long legal contracts that they sign. I would have been surprised if this wasn't standard in the EU as well as Asia
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I agree with not imposing arbitrary limits. The point was simply to keep the text as short as possible. For example, anything with a Creative Commons license can be described in at most eleven characters: the longest and most restrictive version is "CC BY-NC-ND". When you see those eleven characters you know exactly what the terms are for that work, without reading the full license text on each occasion.
I doubt we could compress all standard contract terms down to that length, but I do think most could be written in 1KB—or perhaps one printed page, double-spaced with decent margins—if we're only spelling out the truly unique parts.
A thousand letters should be plenty for almost every contract the average consumer is likely to encounter if they stick to well-known and standardized terms instead of writing every contract from scratch in impenetrable legalese. I wouldn't set a hard limit of 1KB, but it's not a bad goal to strive for.
People can reasonably be expected to learn the nuances of a small set of common contracts; we could include this as part of the standard school curriculum. They cannot be expected to read and fully understand separate one-off contracts full of legal jargon for every company they happen to deal with. As such, deviation from the standards should be expensive. I would consider it perfectly reasonable to require companies to submit any custom contract terms to the courts in advance if they want them to be enforced against arbitrary members of the public, and to reject any non-standard terms which would not be readily comprehensible to at least 80-90% of the target audience.
It's an anti-pattern. People are pressed for time due to social pressure. The length of the documents adds to the stress, especially since it is full of legal jargon and looks like things you've seen before. Personally I think contracts need to be easily readable by laymen. Otherwise companies have an unfair advantage to tricking people. Isn't deception supposed to be illegal?
Companies should provide a straightforward statement on what is in the contract.
Twitter: you are limited to 140 characters because of ppls attention spans, here's 10,000 word+ EULA a lawyer would struggle to understand.
Is it reasonable to assume I can agree (as a non-lawyer) to terms and conditions that are 50 pages (wild guess) long? Especially since they are written in legalese?
Since you're obviously used to taking everything absolutely literally, I'd suggest using a screen reader if you want to hear the terms and conditions said out loud. Otherwise, you have to read them.
There should be a law mandating that terms and conditions be readable and of a reasonable length.
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