Two Slashes

I honestly can’t put my finger on why some of the top stories of the past two days are nothing more than reports of people who found random bologna in the EULA of some software they were installing (or considering installing).

Is it just me, or does anyone really care that Safari (until late yesterday) couldn’t be installed on non-Apple hardware?  Is anyone shedding a tear that youngsters shouldn’t be looking up something with a search engine?

No offense, but I think the time of those lengthy legal documents is drawing to an end.  Users ignore them.  Companies (obviously) don’t even bother proofreading them anymore, and instead distribute them without even verifying that their demands and requirements are enforcable.

I myself have had some very interesting run-ins with EULAs over the past few months.  Not that I’m running to alert Slashdot, The Register, The Onion, or any other news source that might care to listen to me (even if they don’t take it seriously), but there’s something going on when companies shrink the viewable area of the agreement to such insignificant lengths that it’s almost a waste of space to even have it there in the first place.

Users click through any agreement displays without reading.  It’s been proven time and time again.  It’s one way malware installs itself without violating laws, it’s one way software companies can get you to bite off more than you originally wanted, and, believe it or not, it’s one way end users are made a joke out of.  Yes, I said joke.  There’s definitely something to be said about a company who can embed a paragraph on getting paid to read the EULA into one of their agreements, and then sit back and wait four months for someone to come across that, all with countless people installing the software and missing their chance at payment in the meantime.

If people aren’t even going to bother to read what they’re agreeing to, perhaps it’s time to dumb it down into a few bullet points.  Heck, make the bullets checkboxes, and you can make sure the user reads each and every one of those (perhaps require one of them to be *unchecked* in the way they’re worded to prevent the same type of clickthrough that occurs now from occuring in the future).  By making the users actually sift through and read everything you’re requiring of them, it will make them understand more of what’s going on.

If you’re a developer, jump outside the box.  Don’t write pages and pages of nonsense nobody (including yourself) ever reads again.  Your users certainly aren’t reading it.  So why not encourage them to, and demonstrate that being careful and paying attention are beneficial?