How Did We Stop Caring About Terms and Conditions?

By: L. Roschel

Now, most users blindly hit “Accept” without glancing at the walls of text, thousands of words and paragraphs filled with complex legal jargon, followed by restrictions, permissions, and conditions. The simplicity of scrolling down until the desired button became more evident and common, society got used to ignoring all those clauses that grant excessive data collection privileges or waive consumer rights. However, how the habit of ignorance reached us is a mystery. 
Science-fiction movies warned us of dystopian futures where unchecked technology indeed enslaved humanity, like The Terminator, The Matrix, and Blade Runner painted pictures of worlds where humans lost control of their digital creations, resulting in unimaginable universes, with several dangers running free. A while ago, people worried about privacy, security, and the consequences of agreeing to a company’s fine print without reading it. 
 Nevertheless, look around, how many people distribute photos of their faces, hence AI can create a professional profile, expose their personal information, or even guarantee access to the camera, microphones and cell phone gallery for an app or site that they just installed. Saying it like that, I bet it sounds serious, but honestly, how many times have you done this without realising the consequences? 
A 2018 Deloitte survey found that 91% of consumers never read the terms before accepting, just because we created an illusion of trust. For example, before you go to bed, you probably put your phone on charge because you know that if it's dead the next day, tomorrow is over. We ask Google to save our passwords, and we use the same password for millions of other accounts, and we still get furious if we've been hacked.
When we are children, we ask why for everything, we even cry if we hear someone say that the world will end in billions of years, because we had no perception of things, and this is normal, since we acquire this over time. We get used to seeing people say that it is not necessary to read the Terms and Conditions, many of us see our parents just agree to the clauses and move on, and we learn that this is the standard. With technology increasingly present in our daily lives, realising its benefits and how it makes our lives easier, that past fear has become a distant fiction, reducing the concern.
But because this presence is growing so fast, we must become more aware of our actions on the internet, what we do, what we allow and what we access. In an age where technology moves faster than regulation, I will leave you with a question to reflect on a little: if the Terms and Conditions were truly so useless to be ignored and left aside, why would several professionals have spent hours and days planning and creating them?