Previous studies have suggested about 90 per cent of people don’t bother reading terms and conditions before signing up to services like Facebook, Uber, AirBnB and basically everything else.
And that’s despite those T&Cs being legally binding and “but obviously I didn’t read them, no-one does” not being a defence.
And the standard argument thus far has been that if consumers choose not to read said terms then they’ve got no-one but themselves to blame.
After all, they’ve taken the cavalier decision to click “accept and continue” instead of carefully poring over the pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of jargon before agreeing to the update to the operating system without which this expensive computer transforms into a very shiny doorstop.
So yes, we already know that companies have us over a barrel with this.
Legal reenactment of how T&Cs work.
However, a new study by researchers at Ramat Gan Law School and the Victoria University of Wellington reported at The Conversation makes a startling new discovery: not only do most people not read the T&Cs, but most people can’t read them.
As in, they’re deliberately filled with impenetrable legalese which only people with around 14 years of education would be expected to comprehend.
More specifically, the language and length of consumer contracts has found that they’re “written at the same level as academic articles” – which immediately makes them impenetrable to a large amount of users, especially those with limited English or even moderate difficulties with literacy.
Or, um, this.
The authors make recommendations for regulatory changes to address this weird legal theatre for something more straightforward. We suggest “Anything what goes wrong is your fault, and also we own your stuff. Clear?”
After all, what else are we going to do – not use Menulog? Are you mad?