If you're like most people, terms and conditions are scrolled past, as if on autopilot, and agreed to without much thought.
The problem is that many mandatory online legal agreements, such as privacy policies and terms and conditions that you must agree to when signing-up for a website, are far too long to be read in a reasonable amount of time. Not only that, but the legal lingo can be difficult for many people to understand.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, crunched the numbers to find out how long it'd take the average person to read the privacy policies they agree to in a year.
Their calculations were somewhat shocking; concluding that the average internet user would have to spend 76 work days to read the things they'd agreed to online.
They made their calculations based on the median length of the top 75 websites' privacy policies, which came in at 2,514 words. Another variable was how long it took the average person to understand the policy, which they based on a comprehensive questionnaire given to 212 participants of the study.
So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies! If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. Nationalized, that’s 53.8 BILLION HOURS of time required to read privacy policies.
They also did a hypothetical calculation based on how much it would cost the Americans if they spent those hours actually reading the policies, losing valuable work hours: US$781 billion.