As with all things in life, Terms and Conditions apply. You hear it in adverts, you see it on websites, you are presented with it when you install software, but do you actually ever read it? End User License Agreement, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, call them what you like, they are the legalese you are presented with when you need to accept responsibility for something you are about to do.
Most of us simply scroll down to the "Agree" button, click and carry on, and there's a good reason for this. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon recently conducted a study to see how long it would take the average person to read just the privacy policies they were presented with when visiting websites.
The researchers took the top 75 websites and analysed their privacy policy documents. They discovered that the average document was 2514 words in length. They then further added the time it would take, not only for a person to read the document, but how long it would take them to understand it as well. The results were a little disturbing.
It would take an individual 76 working days to read all these privacy policy documents. That's a full 15 weeks of work you would need to dedicate to making sure you understood how those websites would treat your private information.
Of course, no one has that sort of time to spend reading dry documents like these, and that might just be the point.
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