Few read TOSes, not even Paypal’s

 

It’s been a known fact that almost nobody both­ers with the man­ual, until some­thing actu­ally goes wrong. Same with the Terms of Ser­vice. A dev­as­tat­ing sur­prise is that only a small amount of Pay­Pal users actu­ally read the TOS before reg­is­ter­ing a Pay­Pal account. The rest of the users read the TOS after hav­ing some prob­lems with PayPal.

A TOS comes with almost every site

When you reg­is­ter an account (or for that mat­ter visit a site), you get entered into a agreement/contract/etc. TOSes are clev­erly dis­guised in sev­eral forms, their alter­nate names come in the form as:
–Terms of Use (okay, maybe not that clev­erly dis­guised)
–EULA
–Pol­icy
–Rules
–Copyright

And, the most favor­ited place where the TOS would be linked to is usu­ally at the bot­tom, or even worse — com­pletely inac­ces­si­ble from the main page unless you click through sev­eral pages.

The prob­lem with TOSes

Cur­rently, TOSes are sim­ply words, well hun­dreds of words. No one wants to read a legal essay when­ever they sign up for some­thing, even for some­thing as impor­tant as Pay­Pal. No mat­ter how the TOS is dec­o­rated (on aver­age, most TOSes use line-breaks, bolding/italics, ALL-CAPS and lists, but that’s only to improve plea­sure for read­ing the TOS), it is still ignored.

A sweet test over at O’Flaherty found that almost no one actu­ally viewed the Terms despite the site being mildly pop­u­lar. Want another exam­ple? Pay­Pal is pop­u­lar amongst teens, but there’s one prob­lem — Pay­Pal doesn’t per­mit the “under­aged” to reg­is­ter an account in the first place. 2 exam­ples not enough? Google AdSense is another unfor­tu­nate tar­get (though that has changed when users found Google to be incred­i­bly com­pli­ant with such terms).

In addi­tion, using some nice stats on this site, the amount of page-views on the pol­icy page is about 4% of that of the front page, and that was even with adver­tis­ing that throuhout the site (not just at the footer).

Should TOSes be different?

The prob­lem with a long TOS is that no one is going to read it. How­ever, the prob­lem with a short piece of legal text means that you will not have all the “pro­tec­tion” you need. A solu­tion to both? Have a sum­mary. Or, even bet­ter, spruce them up with col­ors to draw atten­tion to some impor­tant places (do for­mal stuff need to be always black and white?).

The most read TOSes?

A search on “terms of ser­vice” across sev­eral search engines yields some inter­est­ing results. Why search for such a thing on search engines? You see, terms are likely to rank up higher if they are more linked to, are highly acces­si­ble and rel­e­vant right? Right. So by this the­ory plus a lit­tle back­ground dig­ing on who has the “best” TOSes (they have to read it to know it is the best any­way…), the fol­low­ing would be the more read and exposed TOSes, sorted by alpha­bet­i­cal order:
–AIM/AOL [well, maybe not on reg­is­tra­tion any­way]
–Google [don’t for­get that Google’s pri­vacy pol­icy went under news spot­light as well]
–Pay­pal and EBay [Most read doesn’t mean many users read it]
–Sec­ondLife
–Yahoo

Tagged as: Terms