Reading the Terms & Conditions is a very rare occasion, and has been for many people. I am included in this, because it's not something I want to put my effort into doing. It always seems to be a long page of small writing that no one wants to carefully read.
A Georgia high school teacher, Donelan Andrews, won a $10,000 dollar reward just for reading the Terms and Conditions of a travel insurance policy when purchasing a trip to England. The Florida insurance company inserted a prompt in between the terms and conditions that promised $10,000 dollars to the first person that emailed the company saying they read it. The company had created a top-secret Pays to Read campaign which showed the significance of reading policy documentation.
In 2017, 22,000 who signed up for free public WiFi, agreed unknowingly to 1,000 hours of community service because the company wanted to show how the lack of consumer awareness of what they are actually signing up for.
It makes you wonder what you actually have signed up for when using certain social media. No one wants to actually read the fine print, its long and quite boring. Sometimes this can be considered dangerous, as you can be agreeing to just about anything.
My cousin signed up for a shoe site called JustFab when she wanted to order a pair that she liked. She didn't realize at the time that in order to be a member, they would charge you a certain monthly fee. She was angry because the site did not make this obviously stated anywhere on their media platform. She realized that they did however, state this in the Terms and Conditions. She kicked herself because she skimmed fast not paying attention to anything that was stated. She did get angry though and blamed it on the, "who actually reads the Terms and Conditions though?".
We need to be more aware of what we are agreeing to when we agree to the Terms and Conditions of online platforms in which we share our personal information and photos. These platforms have ownership on the media that is posted and can do what they would like with them. We need to resolve this by fixing the way that Terms and Conditions are presented to us.
This is a very important read. It has been instilled in our heads since we were kids to always read what we sign, but it is simply not that easy. Sometimes the terms and conditions are created to be unreadable. The huffpost wrote an article on the simple reasons you should always know what you are signing up for. This article is called "Read Contracts before Signing". They list obvious reasons like understanding your lease so you don't get screwed, a return policy or a warranty agreement. I like this blog post because it gives fun incentivizing reasons to read them like winning money. It could happen but is extremely unlikely and was only done to highlight the fact that no one is going to do it.
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ReplyDeleteThis is an important topic that everybody should know about when they are buying anything in general. Reading the terms and conditions is painful, and I would know because I have tried to sit down and read them while I am updating my phone. I want to know what I am agreeing to, but it is just too long. I thought it was very interesting that a travel agency would use money as an incentive for reading the terms and conditions, yet we shouldn’t have to do that. I think that companies shouldn’t hide things in the terms and conditions that they know we won’t read. I think that instead, companies should change the language that they use in the terms and condition. They should also make it much shorter. That is the only way that people are going to read it. Yet, that is exactly what big companies want. They want their customers to just skip over it and not read what is hidden. It is hard because after reading this and watching Terms and Conditions may apply in class, I know that without companies changing their lengthy and hard to read terms and conditions I will not sit down and read them thoroughly.
You can count me among the demographic of those who never read the terms and conditions. Even if we took the time to read through the pages and pages of jibber jabber, the end result would be “Do we want/need to use this service,” or “Nope, I don’t agree and am not.” I think the only realistic move we can make is by supporting policy changes and backing politicians who are trying to make things more transparent. Terms and conditions, or “opt-in” vs. “opt-out,” are a major flaw in the way business are allowed to operate. It is the equivalent to food companies who have dozens of unreadable ingredients listed on their product, yet we still consume them because how harmful can Acesulfame potassium be if we don’t even understand it?
ReplyDeleteI think that eventually people will start boycotting products that have complicated terms and conditions, although right now convenience currently outweighs complication. How hard would it be to boil down the terms and conditions to a maximum of 10 bullet points? Or is it the fluff in between that allows for companies to operate with such outrageous terms? At some point, people will get fed up with how things are, but I don’t think that breaking point is close.