The biggest lie on the Internet: ignoring the privacy policies and terms of service policies of social networking services

By Jonathan A. Obar, Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch. Information, Communication & Society, 2018

638 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses ‘the biggest lie on the internet’ with an empirical investigation of privacy policy (PP) and terms of service (TOS) policy reading behavior. An experimental survey (N = 543) assessed the extent to which individuals ignored PP and TOS when joining a fictitious social networking service (SNS), NameDrop. Results reveal 74% skipped PP, selecting the ‘quick join’ clickwrap. Average adult reading speed (250–280 words per minute), suggests PP should have taken 29–32 minutes and TOS 15–17 minutes to read. For those that didn’t select the clickwrap, average PP reading time was 73 seconds. All participants were presented the TOS and had an average reading time of 51 seconds. Most participants agreed to the policies, 97% to PP and 93% to TOS, with decliners reading PP 30 seconds longer and TOS 90 seconds longer. A regression analysis identifies information overload as a significant negative predictor of reading TOS upon sign up, when TOS changes, and when PP changes. Qualitative findings suggest that participants view policies as nuisance, ignoring them to pursue the ends of digital production, without being inhibited by the means. Implications are revealed as 98% missed NameDrop TOS ‘gotcha clauses’ about data sharing with the NSA and employers, and about providing a first-born child as payment for SNS access.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71373a8406214f32aeff478d62a64a770de86a5d

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Citations in the corpus

Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence (2020, background): “Privacy policies are rarely read by users [42, 43, 55] prior to using or visiting a site/service.”
Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions (2020, background): “…over-whelming sentiment puts pressure on individuals to understand the privacy policies and terms of service, research also indicates that individuals do not read, nor understand, the verbose legalese (Obar & Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2018), which points to the importance, and also limits, of data literacy.”
Documenting Geographically and Contextually Diverse Data Sources: The BigScience Catalogue of Language Data and Resources (2022, background): “…and over-represent sexually explicit content (Luccioni and Viviano, 2021), and typical web-crawling collection practices have no structures for supporting informed consent beyond websites’ own terms and conditions policies that users rarely read (Cakebread, 2017; Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2020).”
We Value Your Privacy ... Now Take Some Cookies (2018, background): “Studies have shown that users rarely read privacy policies because of their length and complex vocabulary [38], [41].”
Just What do You Think You're Doing, Dave?' A Checklist for Responsible Data Use in NLP (2021, background): “That said, they are often long, impenetrable, and many users (even researchers) give consent without reading them (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2020).”
Digital labour platforms and the future of work (2018, background): “Many platforms contain “terms of service” documents that may be given some contractual effect.16 While the contents of these documents are rarely read – much less scrutinized – by technology users (Obar and Oeldorf-Hirsch, 2016), they are particularly important for online microtask workers.”
Machine Heuristic: When We Trust Computers More than Humans with Our Personal Information (2019, background): “For example, they mindlessly consent to various privacy terms and conditions and share their contact information and personal photos/videos to mobile applications without thinking about the consequences [20].”