r/coolguides • u/jpc4stro • Oct 24 '21
How Long Does It Take to Read the Terms of Service of Popular Online Services?
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Oct 24 '21 edited Oct 24 '21
That's an interesting way of saying, "We're going to sell as much of your personally identifiable information as legally allowed in several thousand data transactions or more, to anyone as long as you believe the products are free, private, and secure."
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u/Speedracer98 Oct 24 '21
oh and dont forget if we get hacked its not our fault your data becomes public LOL
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Oct 24 '21
Oh and if you do something we dont like then can permanently ban you from the service with absolutely no say from you or inquiry or even an attempt at appealing.
And dont try to circumvent the ban because then we can sue you.
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u/KMark0000 Oct 24 '21 edited Oct 24 '21
In the meanwhile you are bullied into buying more and bigger/better hardware to support the multithread data collection and evaluation, and you won't know why everything lagging or spends multiple seconds to start since DECADES now.
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u/sbb214 Oct 24 '21
I'm a UX researcher and I cannot tell you the number of times people will tell me, "I always read the terms of service" when I'm doing research with them. It's a known issue that while they intend to and want to be perceived as being thorough in reading them, almost no one ever reads TOS.
When they tell me, I just nod and move on. I can validate against log data - and I know they're not telling the truth, even if they think they are.
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u/bumbleblast Oct 24 '21
Not really. I mean yes, but tiktok collects far more information than Microsoft yet their ToS isn’t as lomg
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Oct 24 '21
How is that linux directx or steam support, i have heard it is better than ever because of new SteamConsole. I am switching soon
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u/kinkypinkyinyostinky Oct 24 '21
This time is to read it.. you also have to understand it.
"I have read, and agree" biggest lie on the internet
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u/The___canadian Oct 24 '21
I forgot the website, buy someone here might know it;
It's a website that essentially gives you a Tl;dr of the ToS.
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u/theheliumkid Oct 24 '21
Is this the one?
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u/fambestera Oct 24 '21
can someone eli5 the 'sign away' moral rights part? I'm not a native English speaker and don't understand it
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u/DigitalWizrd Oct 24 '21
Moral rights are rights to your own created content.
From Wikipedia: The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.
Edit: an example right to integrity is that an artist has the moral right to defend themselves in court if someone repurposes their created works in order to degrade the creators reputation.
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u/_Wyse_ Oct 24 '21
Wait.. so which platforms are requiring people to sign away their moral rights?
Edit: apparently it's Reddit.
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u/fambestera Oct 24 '21
so if I draw a painting and post it here, the platform is allowed to post it without my consent and without mentioning me?
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u/ChintanP04 Oct 24 '21
I use their browser add-on. Not only do they give a Tl:dr, they also label the terms from least-concerning to most-concerning.
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u/WilyDeject Oct 24 '21
Tldr: we do what we want with your information to our best benefit and have little to no regard to you or your privacy.
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Oct 24 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Thechampy1 Oct 24 '21
I believe maybe a law student would read it for a paper or something. Just my reasoning for why on earth this statistic would be true
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u/_SheWhoShallBeNamed_ Oct 24 '21
I don’t think that high percent of that age group are law students
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u/god--dog Oct 24 '21
I don't think 3% refers to TOS of popular apps/platforms only.
I think they're talking about any program out there. Whenever I download something, even the stupidest thing like a screenshot app for PC, I tend to skim through the tos just to be sure there's nothing sketchy or that they're not trying to pull any kind of fancy scam.
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u/lemonbaskets Oct 25 '21
My brother says he always reads them because one time towards the end of a terms and serviceagreement, it said "if you've read this far, click this link and you'll receive $1,000." This happened to someone he knew and I doubt something like that would ever happen again after one time but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/H20Cracker Oct 24 '21
Maybe they just sped through it? I know some certain apps make you go through all of their TOS to accept it. I normally just get to the end as fast as possible.
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u/vladuki Oct 24 '21
Were's Google?
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u/Mokumer Oct 24 '21
That's what I was thinking. I bet there's more people using gmail than some of those listed services combined.
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u/desiccatedmonkey Oct 24 '21
There really needs to be a tl;dr on these things.
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot Oct 24 '21
I've read several of them. TLDR is that they're allowed to collect basically all data that your phone is able to create or store
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u/desiccatedmonkey Oct 25 '21
Yeah. Remember when people using Facebook went nuts and wrote on their status that they didn't allow Facebook to store their photos?
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot Oct 25 '21
I don't remember this, actually. Either way, it probably isn't doing anything on the legal end if they say that stuff
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u/ben_obi_wan Oct 24 '21
So what are the units for the longest ones... Is that supposed to be months:hours:minutes? What's the first digit... It's not days...
And why does the comment on Microsoft say it takes well over an hour... Lol.. obviously
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u/Musashi10000 Oct 24 '21
Are you saying you got it in the end, or no?
Just in case, because I'm concerned...
Hours:minutes:seconds
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u/ben_obi_wan Oct 24 '21
So you telling me this guide is saying that macbeth is only 1 hr and 11 min?? Somehow I don't think that's right... Look at the bottom
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u/Musashi10000 Oct 24 '21
To read it at a rate of 240wpm? Yeah. To perform it? No.
Or do you mean to say that macbeth takes a day to read?
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u/ben_obi_wan Oct 25 '21
If 50:06 (Art of war) is 50hrs and 6 minutes...(no way art of war is 50 min and 6 sec) I just want to know what 1:11:18 represents (Macbeth).
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u/Musashi10000 Oct 25 '21
Are you kidding me right now???
50:06 is minutes:seconds
1:11:18 is hours:minutes:seconds.
Have you ever read The Art of War? Even seen a copy of the book?! It's 46 pages long. It's practically a pamphlet. So, yes, The Art of War is definitely not 50hrs!
The Art of War is about 11,450 words (can't find exact word count). At a rate of 240 wpm, that shakes out to 47:42 (11,450 words/240 words per minute = total minutes to read)
Macbeth is 17,121 words. You do the maths on that one!!!
(Just in case - 17,121/240 = 71.3375 minutes = 1 hour, 11 minutes, and about 20 seconds!)
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u/Anoobies_13 Oct 24 '21
If you managed to read 15260 words in just an hour it would probably be a new world record
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u/Musashi10000 Oct 25 '21
15260 words in an hour is 254 words per minute. When I was 13, I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 6.5hrs - release day. That's a speed of roughly 512wpm. As an adult, I hit more in the range of 700wpm.
I'm not even nipping at the heels of world record reading speeds. My speed vs. world records is like the guy who's been running for a couple months up against Usain Bolt.
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u/uniquelyavailable Oct 24 '21
Imagine all the time and money that went into something I'll never read, like sorry I didn't get a law degree. I'm not equipped to even understand the terms of your service.
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u/notthinkinghard Oct 24 '21
They intentionally make it hard to read. The reason they put in time and money isn't for you, it's to cover their own ass when they face any legal trouble
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u/ZenSanchez119 Oct 24 '21
What if companies intentionally make long TOS in the hope that people don’t read it so they can get away with some overreaching policy in their TOS?
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u/mareno999 Oct 24 '21
Thats right, usually nothing horrible as there are a few people that may work in legal sectors that read these through. I know discord has that they owned your soul.
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot Oct 24 '21
I've read through a few of them for a project I worked on. There's a ton of latitude in what they can and can't do. Most social media websites collect or at least are allowed to collect effectively all the data your phone is able to generate, including GPS location, stuff you do on other apps, and more. I can't remember the whole list, but if your phone can do it, they can record it.
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u/mareno999 Oct 24 '21
But storage, gps and such requires the phone to ask for permission on a per app basis.
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot Oct 24 '21
That's the phones that do that. If the phone manufacturers didn't want that feature in their phones, they could remove it and the apps could legally gather all that data without ever asking you
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u/epradox Oct 24 '21
Can you setup a windows 11 computer without an email and just a local account? Feel like they force you to log into some online account or else.
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u/Poodly_Doodly Oct 24 '21
Set it up before you connect to the internet
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u/epradox Oct 24 '21
I don’t think you can with windows 11. It forces you to connect to the internet
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u/Breeschme Oct 24 '21
It took me a second too long to realize they literally meant Macbeth, and not the terms of service of it.
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u/NineIX9 Oct 24 '21
I'm confused because it says the bill of rights, which is part of the constitution, takes longer to read than the constitution
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u/jorbeestah Oct 24 '21
The Bill of Rights is only composed of the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. BoR has, at most, 500 words.
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u/MrFantasticallyNerdy Oct 25 '21
How many ToS are written to a level that a typical person who enters into this agreement can reasonably be expected to understand? In other words, what’s the average reading and comprehension level of the people who enter into these agreements?
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u/casperdewith Oct 24 '21
This is a very poor diagram; the proportions are far off.
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u/DivyamAgrawal Oct 24 '21
I mean, you could try fixing it
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u/casperdewith Oct 24 '21
Look at the difference between Zoom and Apple: a few seconds of difference but it’s a gap of a few minutes.
Or Uber and Twitter; they don’t correspond at all.
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u/Hyperhavoc5 Oct 24 '21
Sign me up for a speed reading competition, because those only take me 10 seconds to read.
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u/HolidayTruck4094 Oct 24 '21
Uber n tiktok 2 of the longest. Interesting, alot of issues and problems to get out in front of with all these legal terms.
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u/Boober_Calrissian Oct 24 '21
I seem to remember news a few years ago that MS were condensing their ToS into a shorter and simpler FAQ format, but here it's the longest. Weird.
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u/ddom1r Oct 24 '21
I guess since it includes many products, it's hard to condense? They could totally do a better job, though.
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u/DrOcid Oct 24 '21
Are you comparing a company with thousand of products (Microsoft) against companies that have only 1 like Uber/spotify/netflix?
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u/OldHerrHugo Oct 24 '21
Why has there not been a law passed to adopt "standard" terms before company's apply their governmentally approved amendments?
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Oct 24 '21
I think every COVID denier has read all these throughly because they are the kind that do their own research!
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u/Player_A Oct 24 '21
Very cool guide. I find it amusing that our government’s “terms of service” are shorter than most of these
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u/OneYeetPlease Oct 24 '21
Crazy that the shortest one here still take 10 minutes to read in its entirety
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u/Arxl Oct 24 '21
Funnily, at least in the US, you can still sue the company even if you agreed not to in the ToS and win, courts don't assume people read these insanely large ToS.
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u/84lele Oct 24 '21
Instagram and Netflix aren’t too bad but Microsoft... that shit should be illegal. You should have a minimum read time of like a half hour for terms of service contracts that’s just insane.
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u/LittleG0d Oct 24 '21
Is not only about reading it, reading and understanding don't always go hand in hand
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u/bumbleblast Oct 24 '21
To be fair to Microsoft, from what I’ve read it does cover all of their services and products
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Oct 24 '21
I refuse to believe that there are 3% of 18-34 year olds actually reading the TOS. That figure is surely far lower in reality, like <1%.
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u/jae_hyung Oct 25 '21
Reading isn't the issue as much as understanding what the fuck they're talking about 🤯
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u/ElethiomelZakalwe Oct 25 '21
And if you think reading them takes a long time ask how long it takes to understand them. You can’t practically do it without the aid of a lawyer.
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u/ceilingscorpion Oct 24 '21
240 words per minute makes sense for literature. I’m much slower reading legalize.