Terms and Conditions – worst Attorney Food

Terms and Conditions – OMG, not again!

Are you on the Internet? Yes, you are, because you read this article. So you already encountered the famous “To continue you must accept our Terms and Conditions. OK [Button]. I bet you hit OK to go on.

The Internet Giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Ebay, PayPal and many more publish every 2 or 3 months new “Terms and Conditions”. If you are a user of one of their services, you are asked in a friendly manner to accept their new policies. But 99.8 percent of you would not agree, if you had read or understood what they write.

Mission impossible !!!

I just got one more of these messages from PayPal. It is easy to agree in the mail they sent. Just click OK.
But if you really look at the text, you go nuts. Without a Master degree in law, you sell your soul.

I analysed the text from PayPal, because I couldn’t find the new paragraphs. Although they wrote in the initial text, that new or altered items were marked, I found no marks.

I ran the legal terms through a free and tough text analysing system. The result confirmed my fears.

Terms and Conditions – a true experience

The original text of PayPal is in the PDF file below. I cannot publish it here because it contains 69,916 word. Be warned, it will take about 350 minutes to read. I do not want to steal almost 6 hours of your life. And if you should invest the time, do not forget that you MUST understand each single word and that you MUST NOT omit one single semicolon. Otherwise the corporate attorneys will catch you.

The raw numbers

Words	69916
Characters (including spaces)	415594
Characters (without spaces)	346872
Paragraphs	5297
Difficult Words	27804
Estimated Reading Time	350 min.
Estimated Speaking Time	560 min.

I had been astonished by the reading difficulty. The Flesch index of 52.7 means that a 10th to 12th grade can understand. Flesch calls it “Fairly difficult to read”. Dale-Chall requires you with 10.3 points to have a college degree to easily understand. So, why don’t you read?

Did you read till here?

Either you are a corporate lawyer or you are like me. Offended by Terms and Conditions, you read them. Cheers bro, cheers sis!