Most Online 'Terms of Service' Are Incomprehensible To Adults, Study Finds (vice.com)

Two law professors analyzed the sign-in terms and conditions of 500 popular US websites, including Google and Facebook, and found that more than 99 percent of them were "unreadable," far exceeding the level most American adults read at, but are still enforced. From a report: According to a new paper published on SSRN (Social Science Research Network), the average readability level of the agreements reviewed by the researchers was comparable to articles in academic journals. "While consumers are legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, businesses are not required to write readable ones. This asymmetry -- and its potential consequences -- puzzled us," wrote co-author Samuel Becher, a law professor at Victoria University of Wellington, in an email to Motherboard.

Comments

That is what lawyers get paid to do

[oldgraybeard]

write things in such a way as you can't get held responsible for anything, yet hold your customers to any standard, charge, demand, etc you wish to make.
Lawyers write everything in Legalese, Un Comprehensible, goobbly gook!

Just my 2 cents ;)

Confusing? That's not a bug, it's a feature.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they're designed to be incomprehensible to anyone except a lawyer, they were written by lawyers in most cases. Doesn't matter if you've got three PhD's, unless you're a JD (and sometimes even then if you're not up on relevant case law) you won't have a chance of deciphering a EULA, TOS, or similar legalese document. That's not a bug, it's a feature to let them write the most onerous terms possible while obfuscating that from the end user.

Re: Do many know how to read properly?

[HiThere]

Well, I read the MS EULA, and switched to Apple. A few years later Apple revised their EULA (in an essential security update!). I switched to Linux even though it didn't have a decent word processor at the time. (Well, there was tex, but LaTex was broken, and AbiWord wasn't sufficient.) I ended up doing word processing in HTML and putting page numbers on by hand. But it was better than agreeing to those EULAs.