Terms of Service

The Medium Terms of Service was the most difficult thing I’ve ever read.

When I was a kid, I have a random memory that apply’s to this situation; I thought I should read the terms and conditions. At the time, I was a 10 year old signing up for Runescape. Of course, the game had terms and conditions, and I remember seeing those and telling my parents that we should be responsible to actually read the terms and conditions. If you were going to use someone’s service, you should be responsible to having a certain understanding about it. Then I turned 11, never thought about that conversation again until this exact moment, and never read a terms of service again.

To be fair, that isn’t entirely true. I skim terms of service if it’s not too long or if it’s for a site that I believe I should: generally the less popular sites. I only skim though; if it discusses your willingness to donate a kidney or adopt a child, there’s only a 50% chance I would have seen it.

Speaking of which, I have held a job during the summer since high school at a local park. Sometimes we rent out areas of the park which requires people to fill out a terms and conditions. It’s not overwhelmingly long, but people tend not to read it. Even still, when they do, we secretly wish they wouldn’t. We just want them to sign and leave so we can go back to whatever we were doing before they arrived. So, from that we can take that many companies need to have terms of service for legal reasons, but no one actually wants people to read them. Not the workers and not the customers; it just takes too much time.