Terms of service are the longest contracts most people sign, and nobody reads them

A Carnegie Mellon study estimated it would take roughly 76 work days per year to actually read every privacy policy and terms of service a typical internet user encounters. Nobody does this. The study is from 2008 and the number has only gone up — more services, longer documents, more frequent revisions that reset the "I agree" clock.

What you're agreeing to when you click through:

Mandatory arbitration. Most major platforms include a clause that waives your right to sue or join a class action. You agree to binding arbitration, usually under rules and in a jurisdiction the company chose. Some include a 30-day opt-out window buried in paragraph 47 that almost nobody knows about.

Unilateral modification. The company can change the terms at any time. Your continued use constitutes acceptance. They might email you; they might not. The terms you agreed to last Tuesday may not be the terms in force today.

Perpetual content licenses. "You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, and display your content." That sentence — or something functionally identical — is in almost every platform's ToS. You still "own" your content the way you "own" a song you gave someone an irrevocable license to play anywhere forever.

Termination without cause. Most agreements let the platform terminate your account at their sole discretion with no obligation to explain why or preserve your data.

The legal fiction here is "mutual assent" — contract law assumes both parties read and understood the terms. Courts have mostly upheld clickwrap agreements while acknowledging that nobody reads them, which creates an odd situation where the enforceability of the contract depends on a fiction everyone admits is a fiction.

There have been occasional cracks. A few courts have struck down particularly egregious arbitration clauses. The EU's GDPR forced some actual plain-language requirements. Some companies have experimented with human-readable ToS summaries (though these always include a disclaimer that the summary isn't the real agreement).

Is there a realistic fix, or is the unread contract just a permanent cost of using software?