Uploaded February 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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You agree to new contracts all the time but you probably don't think of them as contracts, they are simply the "Terms of Service". A recent study found that most of these agreements are essentially unreadable. That sets up a one-sides relationship between the services and their users. Fine for the services, not so much for the users...and we're only just starting to see the impacts of this at scale.

These agreements don't just cover websites and web services but also applications, your internet connections, and other critical areas.

This has repercussions in cybersecurity as well as privacy and a number of other areas. The real challenge is that this won't pop up on many people's radars until it's way, way too late.

References:

- the study itself, "The Duty to Read the Unreadable", papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3313837
- an article for Motherboard by Dustin Patar covering the study, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwbg7j/online-contract-terms-of-service-are-incomprehensible-to-adults-study-finds
- Google's ToS, policies.google.com/terms?hl=en
- Facebook's ToS, facebook.com/terms.php,
- Twitter's ToS, twitter.com/en/tos