[MichaelApproved]

Does it even matter? Most people just click "I Agree" even when it's in their language.

It would be an interesting experiment to have people perform another action that's described in the TOS to see what percentage of people have actually read it.

[liedra]

I wrote my PhD on this, actually, but focussed more on EULAs as a case study (though they're much the same thing), looking at whether the consent given is actually "informed consent" from an ethical point of view. Unsurprisingly, it's not. :)

If you're curious and want to read through my PhD I put it up on my website at http://liedra.net/thesis/

Toward the end of my thesis (final chapter) I give some suggestions on how to improve the user interface of EULAs to make them more ethical, but I've had some issues trying to actually make this a reality (stuck in post-docs for now, and haven't been able to break through the academic funding barrier as yet :( ). When I'm further in the academic world I'll have another go, but if anyone's working on this I'd be happy to lend my experience too ;D

[alexkiwi]

the guys from creative commons talked about this at sxsw last year. unsurprisingly no one reads the tos of any page, there are different ways to TRY to get a user to read them, timers, several smaller pages, etc.

for business law class we read through the iTunes TOS, it's amazing what you have to agree to just to buy a song.

[ErrantX]

To prove this I "borrowed" a busy but insignificant site belonging to a friend and changed everything below the scroll bar in the TOS box to the text from a Postman Pat story :)

I think over 6 months we only ever got one person querying it....

[tibbon]

I remember hearing about a story from some large software company putting, "It you read this, call this number for $1,000". It took 6 months for anyone to call them about it. Probably completely anachronistic, but similar and potentially real.

[derefr]

How about writing it in Simple English, with a single sentence per line, and activating the OS's speech feature to read it to the user with a little bouncing ball?

[alexkiwi]

haha I would love to see that. WHAT ABOUT A VIDEO TERMS OF SERVICE. you can't click next until the ToS is over

[albemuth]

Disney might sue them?

[xtacy]

Hasn't anyone attempted to simplify the UI for the ToS? Is it because a UI can be misinterpreted or anything?

[alexkiwi]

the best way I've found to get people to read it is to have AT MAX 3 points ie:

don't abuse the site, we will kick you out don't whine, nobody likes a whiner if you do anything sketchy, we will remove it

legalease will only save you if you can prove that your user read it... which is difficult to say the least