Fighting the Biggest Lie on the Internet : Improving Readership of Terms of Service and Privacy Policies

Abstract: When joining a new service, in order to access its features, users are often required to accept the terms of service and privacy policy. However, the readership of these documents is mostly non-existent, leaving an information asymmetry, the imbalance of knowledge between two parties. Due to this, users are sacrificing their online data privacy without being aware of the consequences. The purpose of this work is to investigate the readership of terms of service and privacy policies among users of social media services. We implemented a prototype called ‘ShareIt’, which resembles a photo-sharing platform to gain insight about readership, behavior and effectiveness of our adjusted presentations of terms of service and privacy policies in regard to readership and comprehension. We conducted a survey experiment using the prototype with 31 participants and concluded, that 80,6% of our participants did not spend more than ten seconds in our terms of serviceand privacy policy. The observed behavior suggests, that social media users are used to sharing information on the internet which in addition to their trust towards online services leads to the aforementioned low readership. We presented adjustments to the presentation of terms of service and privacy policies which showed a slight tendency of higher engagement in comparison to the current way of accessing these documents. This result however, due to the lack of readership examined for our participants, has to remain debatable and needs further investigation.