10 years of terms and conditions I've agreed to
3 points
2 hours ago
| 1 comment
| henryach.com
| HN
henryhoward
2 hours ago
[-]
The task of reading and understanding all the terms and conditions/terms of use/privacy policies/license agreements etc. that I am regularly obliged to claim I've read and understood felt overwhelming, so I recorded all of them for 10 years to quantify it.

In the end it's 3.07 million words, 15x the length of Crime and Punishment. But spread out over 10 years I could have potentially read it all in 4 mins a day.

reply
goodmythical
55 minutes ago
[-]
Today I learned all sorts of interesting comparisons.

The Apple Developer TS and CS is longer than The Great Gatsby.

Butler's translation of The Illiad is roughly a fifth of the King James Version of the bible.

The findings are different from Google AI search which says The NAB online banking agreement holds the record for the longest terms and conditions at 37,707 words and then a moment later says: AT&T's terms of service have reached an astonishing 383,077 words (proof: https://files.catbox.moe/bmdxey.png) [further, that reading the ATT TOS takes either nearly five hours or over 30 hours: https://files.catbox.moe/bmdxey.png] {This is actually mentioned in the article. Digging deeper reveals that the five hour time is the simple "please click this box so you can't sue us" against the entire set of policies referenced within said document: https://www.biggestlieonline.com/policy-length-analysis-2019...}

Reading the actual entirety of the legal agreement with AT&T would take 29.782 129 50 hours or 1 day 5 hours 46 minutes and 55 seconds based on the naive Brysbaert estimate.

The article that I vaguely remember from forever ago had articles that were not nearly so long as I remembered: https://uxdesign.cc/a-dramatic-visualisation-of-terms-and-co...

reply