You know that page with a check box you haphazardly agree to on the way to signing up for various online services? The one with the hundreds (or thousands) of words of legal mumbo jumbo? Yeah, we do the same thing -- it's okay. It's because those pages, the Terms of Service, are boring, lengthy, and probably meaningless. Right? Right?!
Not necessarily. And a new study from Georgia Tech of the "top 30 social and fan creation sites" (from Facebook to Daily Motion) backs that up. Well, first things first: yes, Terms of Service agreements really are difficult to read. Of the 30 sites surveyed, an average reading level of college sophomore was required for comprehension of the TOS. To put it another way, around 60 percent of working age adults in the US (25 - 64) don't understand what they're agreeing to. "It is likely that users may not know what rights they are granting," the study says.