Signed, Sealed,... Confused: Exploring the Understandability and Severity of Policy Documents

TL;DR

This study evaluates how users perceive the understandability and severity of simplified policy documents, revealing biases and emphasizing the need for user-centric legal communication in digital services.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into user perceptions of simplified policy summaries and highlights biases, informing better policy design for transparency.

Findings

Most users report understanding the cases

Bias towards service providers in about two-thirds of cases

Highlights the importance of user-centric policy formulation

Abstract

In general, Terms of Service (ToS) and other policy documents are verbose and full of legal jargon, which poses challenges for users to understand. To improve user accessibility and transparency, the "Terms of Service; Didn't Read" (ToS;DR) project condenses intricate legal terminology into summaries and overall grades for the website's policy documents. Nevertheless, uncertainties remain about whether users could truly grasp the implications of simplified presentations. We conducted an online survey to assess the perceived understandability and severity of randomly chosen cases from the ToS;DR taxonomy. Preliminary results indicate that, although most users report understanding the cases, they find a bias towards service providers in about two-thirds of the cases. The findings of our study emphasize the necessity of prioritizing user-centric policy formulation. This study has the potential to reveal the extent of information imbalance in digital services and promote more well-informed user consent.