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One cannot go online today without eventually being asked to accept a set of so-called Terms of Service. These "terms" are actually legal contracts between the user and the online service provider, despite the fact that users never get a chance to negotiate their contents and can even be entirely unaware of their existence.Ticking the box, “I have read and agree to the Terms,” is one of the biggest lie on the web today.
Almost no one really reads the terms of service they agree to, despite agreeing to various terms on a regular basis. Whether subscribing to a free or paid service or app, a user must agree to pages of legalese despite the fact that many users ignore them and blindly click “I Agree” without understanding the contractual obligations they’re committing themselves to.
The average person reads at a rate of 200 words per minute while a standard “Terms of Service” agreement contains 11,972 words. This means even if a user did attempt to read the terms before agreeing to them, it would take them approximately 60 minutes to read terms of use that contain 11,972 words in average.
In this project I took the content of the “terms of service” of the leading online services that we use on a daily basis (Including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder ect.) and i printed them on a standard A4 wide scroll with a standard legal contract font size and type. After printing this so called terms, I hanged the scrolls in the gallery at the academy, added the amount of words and the time it takes to read each scroll. My main goal was to emphasis how small, helpless and harmful are we against this giant corporates.