The biggest lie on the internet: “I have read and understood the terms of service”

On July 7, two US academics published a paper entitled “The Biggest Lie on the Internet: “Ignoring the privacy policies and terms of service policies of social networking services” which details an experiment they carried out on 543 students, asking them to open an account in a fictitious social network and then studying their responses to the terms and conditions of the site.

Among the terms of service were clauses such as the total and unconditional passing on of all personal information to the NSA, as well as users handing over their first born child to the company. Needless to say, 98 percent of students didn’t bother to read the clauses before opening their accounts. Of the 543 students, 399 didn’t even go through the motions of reading the terms of service. The 141 that did bother to, scanned them for a maximum of 73 seconds: the time required to read them properly was estimated at around 45 minutes.

The results of the experiment will surprise nobody: most of us do exactly the same every time we download an app or subscribe to a new service online.

But let’s be honest, who in their right mind is going to spend 45 minutes parsing a document in legalese, especially non-English speakers? We aren’t presented with these kinds of terms and conditions…