How long would it take to read the legal notices of the various apps and platforms we use every day? This is the question posed by the English online marketing agency Reboot, which looked for the documents and pages where these indications are found, counted the words with a word processor and did some calculations.
meanwhile, a distinction must be made between terms of service, i.e. the legal conditions of use of the app or platform, and privacy rules. Normally the former are longer, and vary between 25.7 minutes on Instagram and 76.7 minutes on Shopify. With privacy comes first, and once again Shopify holds a record: it is the one whose privacy policy is shorter (12.4 minutes), while it takes 53.3 minutes for Paypal. The calculation is always based on English texts and an average reading speed of 30 words per minute.
In the general ranking, Instagram is the one that does best of all: with just over an hour you can read everything there is to know. For Paypal instead it takes 92 minutes. Reboot’s research takes into account only the reading, however, and understandably does not go into the analysis of the understanding of the texts: because, even if we really read all the leaflets of the apps and platforms, we are sure that we would be able to understand what is there written?