Ten Years of Terms and Conditions — Henry
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Ten Years of Terms and Conditions
June 21, 2026
I recorded all the "terms and conditions"1 that I've had to click "agree" to or otherwise claim to have read on a computer or phone for 10 years (starting April 21st 2016 and ending April 21st 2026).
See the terms and conditions here<br>(page may take several seconds to load)
I started doing this because Ts and Cs feel like an aspect of modern life that doesn't work as it's meant to but which we ignore because the workaround is fine and doesn't cause too many problems. Most people regularly make the claim once every few days to have read and understood something they haven't read or understood, and that's probably fine. Most companies aren't slipping nefarious clauses into their Ts and Cs and if they did surely some consumer rights nerd would find it and flag it and it would get in the news and the company would be punished?
I wanted to quantify the burden of our official obligation to read and comprehend all these Ts and Cs.
The end result is:
3,066,332 words from 821 agreements.
= 839.63 words per day over the 10 years
At an average reading speed of 238 words/min [Brysbaert, 2019] it would take:
214.73 hours or 8.95 days of continuous reading
= 3.53 mins/day over the 10 years.
...this doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask when framed like this. A testament to how much we can achieve in the sum of 4 minutes a day over 10 years. Makes me think of all the books and wikipedia pages I could have read in the past 10 years...
Is 238 words/min fair? The legalese would require some time (and possibly further research) to understand adequately enough that "agreeing" would be legally sensible. Also, the content is extremely dry making attention slip and requiring re-reading passages. Also the average word length is probably longer than what that 238 words/min number comes from. The average syllables-per-word is 1.74 for this Ts and Cs corpus vs. 1.62 for the Australian constitution, 1.56 for the US constitution, 1.38 for The Great Gatsby.
I tried timing my reading and understanding of some passages:
A passage from the Virgin Airlines Ts and Cs: 306.23 words/min
A passage from the Pizza Hut Ts and Cs: 210 words/min
A passage from the Zya Ts and Cs2: 191.34 words/min
This seems consistent with the 200-300 or so words/min.
Probably the biggest issue with estimating time taken to read/comprehend is that some of the Ts and Cs refer to other documents that in turn I must imply I've read (e.g. "I acknowledge that I have read the General Information sheet" and "[I acknowledge that...] my personal information may be used by police for general law enforcement purposes, including those purposes set out in the Australian Crime Commission Act 2002 (Cth)"). I didn't burrow into and include these but that could multiply this Ts and Cs corpus several-fold
Some stats:
Here are the ten most common words across all 821 agreements (excluding simple stopwords like "the", "and", "to"):
Word<br>Count<br>% of corpus
1information30,0841.95%<br>2services22,8171.48%<br>3terms15,1710.98%<br>4service13,8420.90%<br>5data13,5020.87%<br>6personal11,7850.76%<br>7content11,0350.71%<br>8account10,0220.65%<br>9third9,8150.64%<br>10party9,3730.61%
The five longest agreements in the corpus:
Agreement<br>Words
699Apple Developer TS and CS57,293<br>590Apple Developer Program License Agreement54,710<br>642AWS Service Terms41,303<br>751Grab Terms of Service34,338<br>497TikTok Terms of Service27,655
Length of comparitive works:
Work<br>Words<br>Fits in corpus
The Great Gatsby50,12661×<br>The Iliad (Butler translation)154,57720×<br>Crime and Punishment209,16515×<br>KJV Bible792,3143.9×
Word counts from Project Gutenberg plain text editions.
Boring caveats:
I'm sure there are Ts and Cs that I missed. Either i was time-pressured at work or in an airport or a clinic or something and didn't have time to copy and paste the Ts and Cs or record a link to them, or I lost them afterwards among other emails or notes. I would be suprised if the lost notes were more than 10% of the current corpus, so it wouldn't change the count much.
Some terms and conditions I noted down but when looking later, I couldn't find them. For example, the policies for free wifi in Rome and Lisbon airports, Hotel Bellvedere.
Some terms and conditions I couldn't find at the time (i.e. the link to read them was broken) but I still had to agree that I'd read them. I couldn't record these.
I did not record any updates to Ts and Cs. E.g. my bank frequently notifies me (feels like weekly but is probably actually once every few months) of updated Ts and Cs and makes me agree to the updated ones. I didn't record these each time, only the first time.
In 2018 when cookie banners on website became much more common (because some European GDPR rules came into effect or something), I developed an approach of avoiding having to agree/acknowledge these as much as possible. I would set display:none through the "inspect" function in the...