Harry Shannon
CBC News Item 21 April 2019
‘Is that even legal?’ Companies may be sharing new credit or debit card information without you knowing.
… Information about the sharing of this kind of information with third party companies is often buried in the fine print of bank and credit card agreements…
There’s a joke about speed-reading. A reader has taken a course and is proudly reporting how effective it is. “Amazing! I read War and Peace in four minutes… It’s about Russia, isn’t it?”
Yet even this wouldn’t be good enough to read the small print on many TV ads. First of all, you have to realize that there is some text at the bottom – when all the visuals are designed to distract you from seeing it.
You also need the eyes of a hawk – even on a very large screen, the font size is so small it’s impossible for normal people to read.
And if you’ve learned how to speed-read, you might just have a chance of getting through the long list of caveats and conditions that apply. At least, I assume they’re caveats and conditions; I’ve never been able to read them.
Then there are the Terms and Agreements of computer software. Hands up if you have ever even read through one (I’m not asking if you understood them). No? Well, that’s no surprise, but we all lie and click the button that confirms we have read them.
So what should be done? Let’s have things explained in normal language. To adapt what Asa Breed says in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle*: “Any lawyer who can’t explain her contract to an eight-year-old is a fraud.” (Cue cliché lawyer jokes – or since there are so many of them, that could be: queue cliché lawyer jokes.)
When it suits them, companies are perfectly capable of saying things so we can easily understand. They have well-trained, highly-paid PR people and lobbyists who do that all the time. And they sure don’t use legal language in their ads to persuade us to buy their products, and those ads don’t go on for page after page after page.
So why can’t we have a law that requires companies to write all consumer agreements in everyday language and make them no more than, say, 500 words? Well, OK, I might allow 1,000 words.
A law like this would be genuinely ‘for the people’.
*In the novel, Asa Breed says: “Dr. Hoeniker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.