Q: Very few of us, if any, ever do this even though many of us encounter it every day. If we did it, it would take us over 200 hours a year. What is it?
A: Read the fine print to privacy policy agreements and Terms of Service before we click Accept or Agree.
Nearly every website has a privacy policy and a Terms of Service. Those are the things you quickly click through to complete a registration or to make a pop-up go away. A study found that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 hours per year.
Jonathan Obar of York University in Toronto and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch of the University of Connecticut. They were confirming, in the lab, what other scholars have found by painstakingly combing data on actual user behavior: nobody reads online contracts, license agreements, terms of service, privacy policies and other agreements. We say we do, with our millions of obedient clicks, but that is, as Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch wrote last year in their paper about the experiment, “the biggest lie on the internet”
Hundreds of college students tapped the big green “Join” button to become members of NameDrop, a new social network. But according to paragraph 2.3.1 of the terms of service, they’d agreed to give NameDrop their future first-born children.
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