DAMMAM — When we sign up for a new e-mail account or want to download some software or buy something off the Net, we usually are presented with a long document — from 2,000 to 4,000 words. The document is an agreement between the users and the website and at the end are two choices: "I agree" or "I do not agree." How many users really read these documents and then click "I agree"? A study in the United States showed that users in the age group 18-25 do not read any of the document and those in other age groups read no more than 0.5 percent.
Mark Hochhauser, a psychologist, has spent the past few years studying the readability — or lack thereof — of online documents, particularly privacy agreements. He was quoted by CNET News.com as saying that most of the documents require the user to click "I agree" before proceeding with their purchase or downloading. He said people rarely understand what they’re signing. They simply click "I agree" without realizing what they are doing. The question then is why companies refuse to use simple language and short understandable text?
Basically the documents are prepared by lawyers who want to protect their clients and who use language and legal terms that the average person is unfamiliar with. The user must scroll through the document and normally does so without even attempting to read it. The users are too trusting; they think the authorities would close the sites down if something wrong or illegal were going on.
In such a situation of blind trust, however, users do forfeit their rights. The onus is on users to decide whether they will read the document before clicking "I agree". At the same time a major responsibility falls on the websites to present information in a form that is comprehensible without using a legal dictionary.
The aim of these hard-to-understand documents is to get somebody off the hook. In a court, the company will argue, "We asked you to scroll down, and you did, so we are not liable." It is all set up in such a way that users have to scroll through, even without reading. Hardly any company, however, has been sued for its privacy policy. And the gist of all those lengthy documents is one sentence: "You cannot sue us for anything."
It surely makes no sense to have a 3,000 word statement written in legal language and jargon which ordinary people cannot understand. It is, therefore, imperative that websites and companies make their privacy contracts and other agreements easy to understand. It is encouraging to note that Yahoo recently changed its privacy policy. It has a chart summarizing some of the privacy information. There are no more long drawn-out 4,000 word legal documents that are puzzling to most people. If Yahoo can do it, why can’t others? Web users should demand no less