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from the What-do-you-read,-my-lord?-Words,-words,-words. dept.
We should each take privacy seriously, even online, and there is a distinction between privacy and security. The latter is a choice, the former is a right. Despite that it is not feasible for most people to read the terms and conditions for the online services which they use, especially when these terms of service weigh in with multiple tens of thousands of words per document.
Private text messages aside, who really cares about data privacy, right? If your photos, contacts, calendar, email, browsing history, search history, musical tastes, files, thousands of status updates, likes, shares and physical movements are all in the cloud, who really cares?
Please read that last paragraph again and let it sink in – that is probably more data than your nearest and dearest have about you. Yet generally speaking, people don’t seem to be concerned that such volumes of data are out there and being used without our consent.
PayPal’s terms and conditions are longer than Hamlet! The vast majority of people will not have the time, or inclination, to read and decipher thousands of words in legalese to work out where their data is going. Ipso facto, this data is being shared without our consent, regardless of whether we have accepted the terms and conditions or not.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jb on Tuesday February 26 2019, @05:49AM
...and far less enjoyable to read.
I propose an alternate rule:
Contracts can be as long as you want, but if they exceed some arbitrary limit on length (say, 640 characters?), they must be written in the form of a play, at least to the standard of Shakespeare (and notarised as such by a recognised literary critic).
That should both encourage the lawyers to write shorter contracts and encourage the average man to take the time to read any remaining long ones.