Why does nobody read terms of service, and what are you agreeing to?
Of the 500 most-visited websites studied in 2018, 498 had terms written above the recommended 8th-grade reading level.
Guess first
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Hardly anyone reads terms of service because they are long and written in difficult language, and on many big websites you accept them simply by signing in. What you agree to is a legal agreement between you and the company, and it can matter even if you never opened it.
Terms of service, also called terms of use or terms and conditions, are the legal agreements between service providers and service consumers. A legitimate agreement is legally binding and may be subject to change.
Studies show why reading them is hard. Among the 500 most-visited websites that used agreements in September 2018, 70% had average sentence lengths over 25 words, where 25 or less is needed for consumer readability. The median score was 15 years of school, and 498 of the 500 scored higher than the recommended 8th grade. And the texts are not getting shorter: among 260 software licence agreements that existed in both 2003 and 2010, the median number of words rose from 1,152 to 1,354.
People have noticed. In 2018, the artist Dima Yarovinsky printed technology companies' terms of service in an artwork called I Agree, to make the point that people often do not understand what they are agreeing to. In 2025, the indie developer Vestman made a puzzle game, Agreeee, because he wanted to draw attention to the fact that nobody reads the terms of service.
What can be inside? One example: among the terms of 31 cloud services in England in 2010, 13 could amend their terms just by posting changes on their own website. Terms of service can change under you, which is part of why they matter.
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Recap
Terms of service are binding contracts written in difficult language, so a tick box does not mean they were understood.
💡 A trick to remember it · Picture a contract printed on a scroll so long it unrolls down the street: signed by all, read by nobody.
Surprising fact · 498 of the 500 most-visited websites studied in 2018 scored above the recommended 8th-grade reading level.
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (14 claims) cites at least one of these.