Most consumers who sign up for an online service, subscribe to a website or even buy something on the internet will have been asked to confirm that they have read the company’s “Terms and Conditions”. Pages and pages of boring, incomprehensible legal language are usually disregarded in favour of ticking the “yes” box and quickly moving on.
One retail company even decided to see how many people would actually notice if they slipped a prank condition into their “Terms and Conditions” and subsequently ended up with over 7,000 customers promising to hand over their souls.
Now Google, which as the owner of dozens of online companies and has to deal with several different sets of Ts&Cs, has decided it wants to do something to make these legal promises easier to understand, by creating one, much shorter set which covers all of its internet enterprises.
Already concerns have been expressed about privacy issues, with some campaigners worried that if users are signed up to two or three Google companies under one universal legal agreement then that will allow the different services to share information such as address books and private data.
However, European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding is confident that Google’s plans to simplify their Ts&Cs will not cause any such problems and praised the company for its firm stance on internet privacy issues. Ms Reding is already planning new EU laws on internet data, but in the meantime, users themselves are responsible for making sure their information is kept safe and secure, even though few are likely to go as far as reading terms and conditions in great detail.
Google has also come under fire recently when it was revealed that results from its search engine were placing hits from its own Google+ social networking site at the top of the list. Many users don’t even realise this is happening or that the function can be turned off in order to carry out a more accurate and comprehensive search.
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