If you automatically “Agree” to a terms and conditions agreement without even reading them, you’re not the only one. Over 90% of consumers accept legal terms and conditions without reading them according to a Deloitte survey in 2017. For younger people, ages 18–34, the rate is even higher with 97% agreeing to conditions before reading.
BBC addressed things consumers don’t want to do. On BBC’s top list of those things, reading terms and conditions ranked as number two.
There are 2 types of online agreements:
- A click-wrap agreements — when you are required to click the “I agree to the terms and conditions” or “I accept terms and conditions” checkbox, but before you do so, the terms and conditions are displayed for you to read
- A browse-wrap agreement is the one where the service providers put the terms and conditions agreement somewhere on the site
Some T&C are not that easily accessible from any and every page of the site and, often, they are not written in a simple language.
Many people are surprised when they find out that they have to pay extra charges, and this is mostly because they didn’t understand everything stated in the payment terms and conditions before accepting it.
But on the other side, there is a growing number of clickbait frauds, subscription traps and deceptive “free” trials according to a quantitative survey conducted by the Swedish Consumer Agency and the ECC Sweden back in 2017.
Users are willing to accept potential consequences in exchange for access
There is an interesting study of how far consumers could be conned into going, conducted by Jonathan Obar at York University in Toronto and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch at the University of Connecticut. They wrote a terms and services agreement for a fake social networking service called NameDrop. In the agreement, they included the disclosure that users provide their future firstborn child as payment, and that users’ data would be shared with the NSA and employers. A tremendous 98% of participants agreed.
“There’s a real concern that consumer protection law is basically being swallowed by click-by-agree clauses”, said David Hoffman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who researches the law and psychology of contracts. Hoffman believes that the no-reading problem isn’t new. He pointed out that few people read the fine print even when it was literally in print.
As The Guardian states, reading an average American’s digital contracts would take almost 250 hours a year due to too complicated and long-winded language. “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, to Motherboard.
It seems like we don’t worry anymore for our kidney to be sold by agreeing to terms and conditions without reading them because we become aware that the data is worth more
So, if you want to be saved from a small print in T&C, control your Subscriptions with Revuto! Sign up: https://revuto.com/ :)
