Most people have probably heard the story about how UK retailer GameStation convinced 7,500 online shoppers to sell them their souls as part of their Terms of Service (TOS).
The story is both funny and frightening, since it highlights how much can be inserted into a TOS document and how few people actually read them.
GameStation got a lot of attention for the stunt, and rightly so, but was candid about why they did it. It was an April Fool's Day gag, to be sure, but it also highlighted that most people don't actually read TOS documents -- GameStation says 88 percent of those purchasing on that day didn't do so.
So, why don't people read their TOS documents when shopping online or installing new software?
Probably because these documents are huge, legal papers with a lot of "hereinafters" and "on condition ofs" in them. Pick a random Website and check out its Terms of Service and look at how long it is.
For fun, I picked on Amazon and loaded up its TOS page for electronic downloads. Printed at its default font size, in 12-point type, it spans three pages of huge paragraphs written in sections and sub-sections, many of which are in all-caps.
That is one of the shorter ones around, too. With terms as complex and full of legal phraseology as they are, most people find them too onerous to read. So how can companies who want to engender consumer trust while maintaining their legal protection do so?
I ran that Amazon TOS through an online tool called Readability.info to see what it had to say. By way of comparison, I ran one of my own blogs from Internet Evolution as well. The results are pretty amazing (and complicated-looking), but one thing stands out: Most print and Web news outlets aim for an 8th grade level of reading. My own article came in at about a 7.8 grade level for reading. The TOS? It came in at an 11th-year reading level.
That alone should tell you something.
So it became obvious that an expert should be consulted about all of this. Intellectual property attorney and patent lawyer Michael Montgomery says, "There is a delicate balance between legal requirements, who wants which terms, and readability." But he warns that, unreadable as they may be, they are usually enforced as binding contracts. "Some of the specific wording, emphasis, uppercase letters, and such," he continues, "are in view of various laws for those specific kinds of terms.
He then pointed out that a good example of a readable TOS can be found at WordPress.com. So I ran that through Readability.info and found that it has a grade level reading of 9, much better than the 11th of the Amazon TOS.
Most TOS documents, being legal contracts, are written by lawyers and rarely involve anyone other than the legal adviser. A business that takes the time to include both a copywriter and a lawyer in the process would likely find that they've got a much more readable, understandable, and trustworthy document for its customers.
— Craig Agranoff is an entrepreneur and national social media consultant as well as a published specialist in online reputation management and monitoring.
Terms of service are such a waste of time. Lawyers make lots of money assembling them. Yet, everybody knows that they will not be read. Everybody knows that the average computer user will not read 5 pages of small text. Yet the system continues to use them. Everybody knows the process is broken
Make it simple. Terms of service must be 500 words or less and must be displayed for 60 seconds.
It'll never happen - but that's about the only way people would really read terms of service. Short, sweet and required.
I agree with you. Thats true. Like i mentioned that time is another impotant factor that hinders the clients from reading the TOS, so i wonder that even an opaque TOS could not attract clients.
But there should be some responsiblity on service providers as well. I think the crux of TOS is not more than few lines mostly. Therefore isn't it a better idea to make an effort for simplifying the TOS.
I bet that if we tracked how long people kept TOS documents on their screens it would be less than 30 seconds. Even with that knowledge, though, I suppose the legal burden is on the client to read the document, no matter how opaque it is, rather than on the service provider to speak clearly and plainly.
I agree with you 100%. It is really amazing to see how difficult these terms of service are. And I am sure that most of us, except of legal experts, cannot actually even dare to go through it. I would be interested to see the statistics results on how many people actually read such difficult documents. One of the reasons, I guess, is the time which everybody is running short of. Nobody wants to spend time in reading those lengthy documents although one is supposed to do it. I think there should be a strong wave of having easy and readable documents being written. Involving some "not-legal expert" persons in this process might ease the situation.
Abuses in the consumer loan business in the United States have led to calls for understandable agreements of a reasonable length. Even lawyers have trouble reaidng them. Whether they will be reformed remains to be seen. But the idea that abuses by the framers of such agreements can lead to a call for regulations seems to have paralleles with TOS agreements. It is obvious fromlooking at the agreements that they are seldome read and are not even intended to be read. Their purpose is to protect and not to inform.
Terms of Service agreements are pretty much neck-in-neck with privacy statements.
I don't think it's the grade level...I actually appreciate reading something at a college level, let alone a grade school level. It's really the content. Regardless, these days, especially, it's a bad habit to get into. Look at all the commotion with Facebook (though that's a little different in that they change them routinely without fanfare). We complain about what we agree to, but we don't read what we are agreeing to. The funny thing is, most people that don't read these, wouldn't dream of blindly agreeing to do anything else! (If you would, look me up....haha!)
Maybe developpers should find a way to make people spend (a reasonnable time) on the TOS pages (they could fix how long it will take to somebody to go through the text) before they could be able to proceed with other sessions.
I don't think it would work. It's not hard to go pour yourself a cup of coffee while your TOS agreement is "being read".
the Terms of Services were more interesting and not all basically the same thing I'd probably read them.
Maybe developpers should find a way to make people spend (a reasonnable time) on the TOS pages (they could fix how long it will take to somebody to go through the text) before they could be able to proceed with other sessions.
I agree MShellC, if the Terms of Services were more interesting and not all basically the same thing I'd probably read them.
Blizzard Entertainment pleasantly surprised me with their Starcraft 2 Beta TOS. They require you to scroll to the bottom of the sceen for the 'Accept' button to be clickable. If you pay attention, the developers added in some funny material. It actually encouraged me to read a good portion of the agreement to see if there were even more little jokes.
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