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One of the many reasons that pushed us to create the project TheAlternatives it is precisely the need to make the absurd better understood length of the Terms and Conditions of most of the websites we register on. We have already tried with Understand privacy policies, where we saw that there are some automatic tools that try to summarize the policies of the various websites for us.
How many of you have ever even dared to approach the page Terms and conditions? It is quite clear that those pages with those terms and those lengths are only a job for lawyers and certainly not for human beings who would like to subscribe to the service.
To give you an example: recently the writer had to create an account on Disney+. Shortly after registering, an email arrives with the general subscription conditions where it is explicitly asked to "read these general subscription conditions carefully before using the service“. The email was so long that I wanted to find out how long it really was. I then copied and pasted the contents of the email into the site Character Count. They were found the beauty of 40448 characters, 5776 words and about 30 minutes of reading necessary. Thirty minutes of legalese, difficult to understand and not always entirely clear to the end user.
Length of Terms and Conditions
All this without any compensation for humans as we find for example on crypt.ee. It is normal for them to want to protect themselves as much as possible in every aspect. It is less normal that they expect that for a quick, simple and immediate registration service on the internet a normal person will read thirty minutes of legalese.
Also because it is often within these thousands of characters that we discover how our data is used, whether it is sold to third parties, whether profiling is carried out and so on.
To give you a trivial example, Google: “We may combine the information we collect on our Services and on your devices for the purposes described above. For example, if you watch guitar videos on YouTube, you may see an ad for guitar lessons on a site that uses our advertising products. Depending on your Account Settings, your activities on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information to improve Google services and ads served by Google.” we should read what we find written here: Privacy Policy. 34 thousand characters And 23 minute read. And precisely in this regard we now arrive at the center of this article.
In fact, let's talk about this beautiful infographic of the legendary Visual Capitalist. How long are the Terms and Conditions of the most popular sites? Visual Capitalist lets us know he wins the race Microsoft and that the 97% of people 18-34 accept everything without ever reading the conditions of use. Strange! We thought it was everyone's dream to read 30 minutes of legal information.
Here is the infographic.
Click on the image to see it in actual size.
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