Vratislav Holub In our lifetime, each of us has probably encountered a number of moments when we agreed to the terms and conditions of a service or product without actually reading them. This is a relatively common issue that practically no one pays even the slightest attention to. There is nothing to be surprised about. The terms and conditions are so long that reading them would waste a huge amount of time. Of course, out of curiosity, we can skim through some of them, but the idea that we would responsibly study all of them is completely unimaginable. But how to change this problem?
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Adam Kos Before we dive into the issue itself, it's worth mentioning the result of a 10-year-old study that found it would take the average American 76 business days to even read the terms and conditions of every product or service they use. But keep in mind that this is a 10-year-old study. Today, the resulting number would certainly be significantly higher. But in the United States, a change is finally coming that could help the whole world. In the House of Representatives and the Senate, there is talk of a legislative change.
Change in legislation or TL;DR
According to the latest proposal, websites, apps and others would have to provide users/visitors with a TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) section in which the necessary terms would be explained in "human language", as well as what data about the tool will collect you. The funny thing is that this whole design is labeled TLDR Act proposal or Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability. Moreover, both camps - Democrats and Republicans - agree on a similar legislative change.
Render of the iPhone 14 Pro Max
This whole proposition simply makes sense. We can mention, for example, the argument of congresswoman Lori Trahan, according to which individual users must either agree to excessively long terms of contract, because otherwise they will completely lose access to the given application or website. In addition, some companies intentionally write such long terms for several reasons. This is because they can gain more control over user data without people actually knowing about it. In such a case, everything takes place in a completely legal way. Anyone who wants to access the given application/service has simply agreed to the terms and conditions, which is unfortunately easily exploitable from this point of view. Of course, it is currently important that the proposal passes and enters into force. Subsequently, the question arises as to whether the change would be available worldwide, or whether the European Union, for example, would not have to come up with something similar. For domestic websites and applications, we would not be able to do without EU legislative changes.
Apple and its "TL;DR"
If we think about it, we can see that Apple has already implemented something similar in the past. But the problem is that he tasked only individual iOS developers in this way. In 2020, for the first time, we were able to see the so-called Nutrition Labels, which every developer must fill in with their application. Subsequently, each user in the App Store can see what data it collects for the given app, whether it connects it directly to the given user, and so on. Of course, this information is also available in all (native) applications from Apple, and you can find detailed information here on this page.
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Pavel Jelic Would you welcome the mentioned change, which would oblige applications and websites to publish significantly shorter terms of contract with various explanations, or do you not mind the current approach at all?
