Last month I spent nine hours reading the terms of service for the twelve apps I use most. It was tedious, occasionally alarming, and — this is the part that should bother you — entirely consistent with what the companies had already told me in a press release.
The clause that allows an app to share “anonymized” data with “trusted partners” is not a secret. It is simply unread. The average person would need 76 working days a year to read every privacy policy they encounter. That is not a literacy problem. It is a design choice.
We have built a legal order in which consent is manufactured by exhaustion. The box is checked. The box was always going to be checked. The alternative is to not use the bank, the phone, the school portal, the hospital’s scheduling system.
Regulators know this. The Federal Trade Commission has said, politely and repeatedly, that click-through consent is a fiction. And yet the fiction persists, because it is cheap and because it works.
I am not asking you to read all of it. I am asking you to notice that you cannot. Then ask your representatives why the burden of vigilance falls on the person with the least time, the least information and the least leverage.
The fine print is where the country’s real policy is being written. Almost nobody is in the room. That should be the headline, not the footnote.
