14 DAY TRIAL // Have you ever read the terms of service agreement when connecting to free Wi-Fi hotspots? If not, you better do it because you might unknowingly agree to clean park toilets if such clauses are included.
UK-based company Purple has conducted a research to determine just how many people actually read the terms before accessing public Wi-Fi and the results aren’t surprising at all.
It turns out that almost nobody does that, despite during the research, all those who connected to the hotspot agreed to things like cleansing local parks of animal waste, manually relieving sewer blockages, and cleaning portable lavatories at local festivals and events.
Purple says that no less than 22,000 people signed to perform the labor after not reading the terms, but rest assured, the company says that it won’t try to enforce the clause, though it’s not even known whether it has the legal power to do that or not.
Lengthy privacy policies
“WiFi users need to read terms when they sign up to access a network. What are they agreeing to, how much data are they sharing, and what license are they giving to providers? Our experiment shows it’s all too easy to tick a box and consent to something unfair,” Gavin Wheeldon, CEO of Purple, said after the test.
The terms of service also included a prize for whoever spotted the special clause, with Purple saying that only a single person spotted it, which represents only 0.000045 percent of the final number of users who connected to the hotspot.
One of the reasons people don’t read the terms of service, Purple says, is that most of them are too long, so the first thing companies should do is reduce the privacy policy to as few words as possible. Purple said it managed to cut its terms of service from 1600 words to just 260, so with a little effort, every hotspot provider should be able to do the same.