I was amused to read that when CHOICE discovered Amazon Kindle’s terms and conditions contained over 73,000 words they paid an actor to read them out loud just to prove a point. It took 9 hours.
With terms and conditions the size of a decent novel, it’s not surprising that hardly anyone ever reads them and most people simply scroll straight to the tick box confirming you agree to accept them so that you can start using the service. Who has nine hours to spare before they start using their Kindle?
Even the basic Amazon marketplace ‘Conditions of Use & Sale‘ contain 6,370 words supplemented by another 8,905 words Marketplace ‘Participation Agreement‘ and a 3,072 word privacy policy.
It’s time companies started worrying less about protecting themselves with mountains of legalese and put together terms and conditions that the average user could reasonably be expected to read and comprehend. Otherwise what’s the point of publishing them?
What’s the longest set of T’s and C’s you’ve ever come across?
Amazon Kindle Terms & Conditions in video
If you do happen to be interested in the Kindle terms and conditions and have a day with nothing better to do, gather together nine hours worth of snacks and drinks and start watching below:
4 Responses
That is ridiculous. I feel like there needs to be some sort of intervention to help protect consumers, no one is going to be able to read that and as a result no one will know what they are agreeing to
All T’s & C’s should have a message that reads “Congratulations, you have just read 6730 words in 0.0264 of a second” that pops up on agreement.
I once bought an iPod (yep, that was back in the day!) and when you first load it it brings up a lengthy set of T&C’s – as an experiment I declined the T&C’s just to see what happened… no prizes for guessing that the unit simply wouldn’t work.
You must always read the Ts and Cs as you never know what could be in there https://channelx.world/2016/02/amazon-is-ready-for-the-zombie-apocalypse.html