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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? Before we get started with the show? Click here to accept the terms of service for this episode. Don't want to do that good on you, but that's what we're talking about today is terms of service and legal click wrap agreements.
Now, that's a term for um legal agreements that you are forced to essentially accept before you can use a service. Now, that's not on uh out of the ordinary to have to accept an agreement before starting to do business with something. But given the rate at which we are accepting these things, it's up to us to understand what's in them.
Now, full caveat as always, I am not a lawyer. Um I do however, read a ton of these terms of service agreements um in, in the course of my security and privacy research, getting ready for various media interviews, my radio column, that kind of thing.
So I'm very familiar with how these things are structured. And now there was this great study that came out um this week uh from two professors. Um They did some social science research around the complexity of these agreements and as of their research project, they analyzed over 500 terms of service from various sites around the internet, including the big ones like Google and Facebook and Twitter.
Um And they found that these were essentially unreadable. And by that, what they mean is that they did an analysis of the complexity of the wording within these agreements as well as the sentence length. There's some standard measurements, uh standard tools to help measure readability and basically, they found you need about 14 years of education um in order to truly understand these uh agreements, the terms of service agreements.
Now the average recommendation for anything that's public facing is about eighth grade and these guys went well beyond it, uh or the terms of service that we normally click on, went well beyond that into graduate level understanding. So most people truly don't understand what they're agreeing to after they've read it and that's assuming they actually read it.
I'm confident saying that and I know that didn't sound confident. So let me restate that. I'm confident saying that you've agreed to hundreds of these things yourself, whether you know it or not using any of these services. Um You agree to the terms of service.
Now, we're seeing it on websites where they pop up with uh oh by surfing this site, you accept our terms of service, not even signing up for an account. So this is a major problem because these terms of service these illegal agreements essentially control how the internet does business, whether it's actually called out or not.
So when you sign up for an account, they lay out the terms of service. Now, sometimes they have a nice, um, sort of human readable version, but that's not what's legally binding. There's a legal contract there and these go on for pages and pages and pages and pages, there's been many jokes about the length of these things or how long it would take you to actually print it out and go through them.
Um There have been cases where people have actually hidden um hilarious contests um or crazy statements like we'll get your first born inside of these agreements because they know nobody actually reads them. But that's a major, major problem because all of these things dictate what a company can do with your data.
They can uh dictate what they can allow or what they allow you to do on service when they can interject and cut you off. So we've all seen challenges around people, losing their Facebook accounts or losing access to um various social media accounts and not having any recourse.
And that's a problem because one of the defining factors of these terms of service is that they lay out where any legal challenges will take place, they lay out the jurisdiction. Um If you want to sue the company, it's gonna be in the jurisdiction of their choice and you better believe that they have picked out that jurisdiction based on, um, an expectation of a favorable rule or something else deeper into the terms of service.
Now, that's a problem because you have these binding agreements. Um, and they're being, if there is a problem with it, it's going to be, um, debated and, you know, uh, a ruling made on the company's favored ground, but even worse. And this is my number one problem with these terms of service agreements is that every single one that I've ever read because this is a smart lawyer move because if you can get the other party to agree to it, why wouldn't you?
Almost every single one of these agreements has a clause like the one you are looking at right now and this is, uh, Twitter's and we're going to see Facebooks and Googles in a minute and they all essentially say the same thing in slightly different wording.
They say that they are allowed to update the terms of service at any point in time and your continued use of their service or product marks an agreement to these updated terms. Now, some of these agreements call out and say if it's a material change, we're gonna let you know, um, so that you can be conscious of the change, uh, we'll advertise it ahead of time.
Um, but they decide what's a material change. Um, and, but they all, almost all have this agreement where you've agreed to it and then they can change the terms at any point in time. This isn't just services like Facebook or Twitter or Google.
Um, this also applies to your internet service provider. You are using their service based on various terms. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing against having contractual agreements that explain what the relationship is between two parties. In fact, I think that's a very good thing.
I think that, um, makes it clear as to what the expectations are, what the trade off is. What is the business exchange here? I think the problem is that it's significantly disproportionate when it comes to all these services that we are using day to day.
People go great. I can, you know, get service X, I can just type in information into Google and they'll point me towards results. Well, there are terms of service that govern that or I can upload videos to youtube and uh you know, great people can see my video and maybe I can make some money down the road if that's what you're into.
Um But again, there are terms of service that uh are in play um that you did not have any hand in negotiating. It's not like a normal business transaction where we figure it out and we'll negotiate and agree to specific terms. They are being presented to you in a flash and you are expected to agree to move on and essentially we all just click anyway, and go, there was a great stat from the Google Chrome team.
Um The few years back that they had analyzed security prompts within the Chrome browser. Basically, they said their data showed people just click on it when you ask them to click to continue because they want to accomplish a goal. And if you put anything in their way, they're going to agree to it to move on.
And I think the same thing applies for terms of service. But the challenge here is that terms of service have a very real legal consequence. And as this study has shown none of us or very few of us can actually read and understand them yet, we are all agreeing to them.
This will come back and bite us at some point. The only question is at what scale, how badly and is there anything we can do about it? Let me know what you think, hit me up online at Mark NC A in the comments down below.
And as always by email me at Mark N dot C A. Have you ever read the terms of service? Did you understand it? Did you like it? Um Were you aware of the scale of the problem? We need to start talking about this because it is only gonna get worse from here on out.
Hope you're set up for a great day. We'll talk to you online and we'll see you on the next episode of the show.
