Kalex's Tome

Reshared post from +Mike Elgan

EU officially agrees that nobody reads terms of service agreements.

The European Commission is planning to stop Facebook's practice of harvesting your political opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs, location and so on and sharing that data with advertisers without explicit user permission.

The new rules will apply to other sites as well, but Facebook is currently serving as the poster-boy for abusive personal data-harvesting.

Here's what's interesting: The sign-up terms of service agreement authorize Facebook to do this, but nobody reads these things. Facebook's is 4,000 words long: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

What the EU is saying, essentially, is that getting users to agree to a long-winded user contract does not let companies off the hook for informing users.

In other words, it's now assumed that nobody reads terms of service agreements (which is true).

What does this mean for the whole industry of software EULAs and online terms of service user agreements?

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