Roll up your sleeves and grab the brushes: you’re now on bathroom duty at the next county festival. Yes, you voluntarily agreed to 1,000 hours of community service when you clicked your approval of WiFi provider Purple’s terms of service (TOS).
What? You failed to read the fine print? You just swooped to the end and clicked OK? You aren’t alone. Purple has a cadre of 22,000 who willingly agreed to perform community service in return for their access to Purple’s free WiFi.
Purple added a “Community Service Clause” to their terms of service. The clause gave Purple discretion to assign community duty to the user, which included:
- Cleansing local parks of animal waste
- Providing hugs to stray cats and dogs
- Manually relieving sewer blockages
- Cleaning portable lavatories at local festivals and events
- Painting snail shells to brighten up their existence
- Scraping chewing gum off the streets
Purple’s intent was to highlight to all of us to read the TOS. Purple’s CEO commented:
WiFi users need to read terms when they sign up to access a network. What are they agreeing to, how much data are they sharing, and what license are they giving to providers? Our experiment shows it’s all too easy to tick a box and consent to something unfair.
So how many individuals noticed the “Community Service Clause” in Purple’s TOS?
One user, yes just one of the 22,000+ who agreed to the enhanced TOS during the two-week period of the test, disagreed with the TOS.
Those with longer memories may remember Game Station’s 2010 April Fool’s Day adjustment to their TOS and order form. Users could opt out (and receive a £5 voucher) or click through and agree to sell their immortal soul. It turned out that 88% of users were willing to give up their immortal souls.
In a 2016 paper authored by Jonathan Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsh, The biggest lie on the internet: Ignoring the Privacy Policies and Terms of Service Policies of Social Networking Services, showed exactly what Purple’s two-week test showed: that the vast majority of individuals – 98% – will miss the “gotcha clauses”.
That’s because users fail to read the TOS page. The researchers used a TOS of more than 4,300 words, which would take about 15 minutes to read properly. The median read time for the 543 university students? A blazing speed read of 51 seconds.
And yes, the content contained several items which the average user would balk at allowing. These included:
- Provide your first-born child as payment
- Your social network content will be shared with your employer
- Your social network content will be shared with the NSA
Purple’s fun and the researchers findings both serve to drive home an important point.
Read what you sign!
Yes, you really do need to mine those TOS or Privacy policies for those hidden gems of “consent” buried within mind-numbing text if you don’t want to end up selling your soul.
LucusLoC
There is a problem with “read what you sign”; doing so is a full time job. One study says that our yearly exposure averages out to a full 76 full time days just reading and processing online privacy agreements. Throw in device agreements, real world service contracts, and other miscellaneous legal agreements and you can see how it is literally impossible to follow this recommendation while still maintaining a job/life. Our legal system is so bloated that it is impossible for consumers to keep up. Currently consumers rely on the benevolence of the court system to throw out burdensome or unusual agreements, but that is far from ideal. I do not know what the solution is, but “please read all your agreements” really cannot be the answer in our current world.
NorthVandea
+1 LucusLoC
Jay
Well, I guess no one else needs to comment. LucusLoC hit the nail on the head. The only thing I’d add is that aside from the time it would take to read these agreements, they are also very rarely written in a language that can be understood by the average user. Something needs to change, but it’s certainly not just “you should read what you sign.”
DuffMan
I came down here to comment this, but LucusLoc have put it so elegantly.
DT
It’s not “literally impossible” to read all the fine print. That would imply that there is no possible way to do so, but obviously it is possible if a person read through the material quickly, such as how the 543 university students mentioned in the article did. The term you meant to use is “improbable.”
Steve
Read the whole statement, DT. “…it is literally impossible to follow this recommendation while still maintaining a job/life.”
Paul Ducklin
I saw the word “literally” written there and was inclined to agree with its use even after my linguistic pedantry warning siren sounded…
I think you can make room for what you might call “special metaphorical use” even of the word literally :-)
In theory, literally is the wrong word here because you could read it if you really, really tried. But in practice you would not actually have “read and understood” it in any semantic sense. Your eyes would merely have passed across all of it.
Steve
That usage of “literally” drives me right up the wall – tempted to insert “literally” in that line! – but we are fighting a losing battle. All of the major dictionaries include the literal and less-than-literal usages of the word in their definitions, including The Oxford which I believe is your own go-to.
For some really interesting historical background on this matter, Google “define:literally” and then choose the hit titled “Did We Change the Definition of ‘Literally’?” found on merriam-webster.com.
Paul Ducklin
My point was in that this case, it *is* as good as literally impossible to read most T&Cs, aat least in the pratcial sense of “to read and understand with clarity and without ambiguity.”
The Oxford Dictionary of English gives two excellent non-literal examples, namely “they bought the car and literally drove it into the ground” (which is unexceptionably witty and as good as true anyway, as you can imagine its ruined suspension sagging ever lower as it gets hammered), and “we literally killed ourselves laughing” (which is neither funny nor really the kind of writing you want to encourage).
Max
Uhm, those 543 university students where an example of people who did’t read it, thus the impossibly fast reading time.
Eric Singer
How many hours of our lives are we supposed to spend reading impenetrable legal documents? Also, a contract that one side has no power to negotiate is not a contract – it’s a mandate. As such, IMO, all end-user agreements and terms of service proffered by all companies should be highly regulated. But yeah, good like with that in this country.
Steve
You think regulation is the answer? It’s regulation that got us into this jungle of legalese!
Max
I think to a point yes, regulation is the answer. If you have a default ToS for all kinds of different services and the providers only need to point out differences for their particular service, a lot of the wall of text would disappear. And it would highlight anything unusual a lot quicker.
Chris
Dilbert got there first (edited to remove link) Also the company is taking a bit of a risk. I have more than one colleague who at times would be more than happy to hand over their (teenage) first born!
RichardD
“one of the 22,000+ who agreed to the enhanced TOS … disagreed with the TOS”
So did that user agree to the TOS, or disagree with the TOS? :o)
Cui Bono
In the UK we have The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977
An Act to impose further limits on the extent to which under the law of England and Wales and Northern Ireland civil liability for breach of contract, or for negligence or other breach of duty, can be avoided by means of contract terms and otherwise, and under the law of Scotland civil liability can be avoided by means of contract terms.
Our Courts are quite likely to interpret this act to exclude anything unreasonable particularly in terms and conditions that are unreasonably long.
Since the Act was passed companies have tended to become more reasonable as to what they put in Ts&Cs – they don’t want judges striking out great paragraphs of their Terms.