The rule that nobody reads

Every app a student installs asks for agreement to a document that almost nobody opens. Researchers who have measured this put the reading rate at well under one per cent, and the few who do open it rarely finish. One study inserted a clause requiring users to give up their first-born child. Ninety-eight per cent agreed.

It is tempting to treat this as a failure of the reader. It is more useful to treat it as a failure of design. The average set of terms for a popular service runs to several thousand words of specialised language. Reading every agreement a person accepts in a year would take weeks of full-time work. A rule that is impossible to follow is not really a rule; it is a formality that transfers responsibility.

Some regulators have responded by requiring a short summary in plain language, separate consent for each distinct use of data, and a refusal that is as easy as acceptance — no hunting through three menus to find the button. These sound like small changes. They matter because they alter who carries the cost of complexity. Under the old arrangement, the company wrote a long document and the user absorbed the risk of not reading it. Under the new one, the company must do the work of explaining.

For a student the practical advice is narrow but worth following. Before agreeing, look for three things: what data is collected, whether it is shared with anyone else, and how to delete an account. If those three answers cannot be found in two minutes, that absence is itself information about the service.