Thoughts on Medium’s New Terms of Service

Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

One Contracts Law professor I knew estimated that about 60% of all contracts currently in effect were void or unenforceable, but worked just fine because the parties who had entered into them did so with good faith, and performed according to their mutual expectations. This is how the Internet works, for the most part. “A Deloitte survey of 2,000 consumers in the U.S found that 91% of people consent to legal terms and services conditions without reading them. For younger people, ages 18–34 the rate is even higher with 97% agreeing to conditions before reading.”[1]

In most cases, we blithely go on about our day; the site or software works largely as expected, and we do or don’t do whatever it is we’re supposed to do or not do (most of us wouldn’t go around reverse-engineering the code or making and selling copies of it). But consider this: Researchers created a fake site and terms that “included the disclosure that users give up their first born child as payment, and that anything users shared would be passed along to the NSA. A whopping 98% of participants agreed.”[2]

Medium may be shocked, tomorrow, to learn how many writers read.

A Quick Flash, and It Barely Registers in the Mind

The fact that Medium had updated their terms quickly flashed across my screen, this…