[oliwarner]

Plain English requirements for financial services (in the UK, not uncommon elsewhere) are a pretty decent example of why you're wrong.

In those scenarios, the bar is moved up a notch to informed consent. Parties must know exactly what they stand to lose.

A fair explanation of how your data could be leveraged against you should be a requirement because users don't understand this currently.

[hshehehjdjdjd]

No matter how plain the language is, it cannot benefit someone who doesn’t read it. You may argue that the lack of plain language in T&C causes the lack of reading. But there’s a natural experiment here in the form of those same U.K. financial services terms you mentioned. Do you honestly believe that a large fraction of U.K. financial services consumers are informed about the terms of financial services they are consuming? I have no data here, but the concept beggars belief. Even if they are ten times as informed as American consumers of internet services, that would mean order 1% of consumers had read the terms, as opposed to 0.1% if people reading web T&Cs.

Even that strikes me as very unlikely, just examining my internal estimates how likely I’d be to read terms and conditions if they were in plain language. I don’t think the impenetrability of the language is the main barrier to reading T&Cs. The main barrier is that there is little on the line, and, moreover, I can already guess approximately what the T&Cs are going to say.

This is just a gut reaction. If you have some data to show that U.K. consumers are significantly more informed based on these plain language requirements, I’m happy to recant.

[oliwarner]

I think we're talking about slightly different things here. While many financial institutions (and others now) will provide a plain English explanation of the whole contract, I'm just talking about the key terms.

"Your house may be at risk if you do not keep up with repayments. Variable rates can go up and down." etc.

These sorts of things are required not just at point of agreement, but everywhere a financial product is marketed. They're short enough. Same thing as you'll see in where medical marketing is allowed.

So in that vein, before Facebook takes data about you, it should be explaining that they and their partners operate a marketing platform that is used to monitor and influence your political views. That they can use your photos of you and your children and others for their own marketing purposes. That licenses you grant them to your content are everlasting and irrevocable.

Somebody did a "joke" list of what Facebook's might look like https://signupforfacebook.org/

It's over-done (on purpose) but initialling each term like this should be a requirement for contracts that subvert your rights [to privacy, here] as is required elsewhere.

I don't have data on the efficacy of said warnings. The rules here have existed longer than I have. But it's not illogical to suggest that forcing somebody to actually engage with the text before they give up data will mean more will read it.

[TheCoelacanth]

The main barrier is that the length of T&Cs is completely unreasonable relative to what is at stake. How can someone be expected to read through and understand something the length of a short novel just to post a few images online or something?