So we brace ourselves for the usual novella-length cataract of legal jargon, with pages’ worth of fat grey paragraphs in SCREAMING CAPITAL LETTERS.
But there are no paragraphs in all caps (bold is used for emphasis instead—fancy that!). The new terms are presented on a clean-looking page with clear subheads to lead you through them. And with the copious subheads, the Terms of Use amount to 871 words.
Even when lawyers are involved, if succinct and transparent terms of use are the goal, they seem to be possible.
The privacy notice is longer—5,266 words, including subheads. But once again, the subheads that guide you through it are a big part of the word count, and many of the other words are clear explanations of how to turn off features you might not like if you want more privacy.
Could these terms and privacy notice be adopted by all browsers, as we have suggested in this space, to create a universal agreement for Web browsing?
Well, probably not. A big part of the business model of Chrome or Edge is selling you, the user, as a product to people who want to know what you do on line, so the agreements would probably have to be longer—although, without the opt-out instructions, they might also lose a few words, so perhaps it would balance out.
But, at any rate, we have found an example of terms and conditions expressed in fewer than a thousand words. It can be done. But how?
Probably just by stating the correct goal.
Let us suppose you have developed a new squirrel-counting app for Android phones. Right now there is a terrible dearth of squirrel-counting phone apps, and countless millions of squirrel counters are waiting to pay you the very reasonable $12.99 to be able to automate the counting process. But to make sure you are not liable for users’ stupidity or malevolence, you need some terms and conditions.
If you tell your corporate lawyer, “We need terms of use for our app,” the lawyer will want to do a good job. Most employees want to do a good job until you beat the desire out of them. But what is a “good job”? You haven’t defined it!
So your lawyer does the natural thing: she works hard to come up with the most unlikely scenarios she can think of and take them into account. She thinks of every illegal use to which a squirrel-counting app could be put, and she specifically prohibits each of them individually and in detail. She measures her progress by pages of text, probably written in Microsoft Word, and at the end she hands you a PDF, which she expects you to distribute as your Terms and Conditions in spite of the fact that it cannot be read on a phone screen.
That is one possible definition of a “good job.” But suppose you told your lawyer this: “Your job is to compress the absolutely necessary legal terms into the smallest possible space, while still making sure that the average reader can not only interpret them but also understand the reasons for them.”
Well, this is a challenge. You have just made your lawyer’s life fun. The assignment isn’t just useful drudgery anymore: now it’s an intellectual puzzle.
But is there any good reason why we, the corporation specializing in animal-counting software (makers of the popular MooseMate), should care whether our terms and conditions are friendly to users as long as they protect us from liability?
Well, yes, there is. It sometimes seems as though the law is a magic spell activated by speaking the proper incantations. But when it is working right, the legal system is our best attempt at making sure that everyone is treated fairly, and good judges interpret the law with that goal in mind. Some day, someone is going to convince a judge that “agreements” that no user can ever possibly read are not binding. When that happens, the 871-word terms and conditions are likely to stand while the 26,000-word terms and conditions fall.
So if you can’t make your terms and conditions short and easily understood because it’s courteous and the right thing to do, then do it because it’s the most reliable way to get what you want out of the suckers who buy your services.