Signed, Sealed,... Confused: Exploring the Understandability and Severity of Policy Documents

2025-02-12

AI Summary

Lengthy, opaque policy documents (e.g., Terms of Service) hinder meaningful user comprehension and risk awareness; existing simplification initiatives (e.g., ToS;DR) improve readability but lack empirical validation of actual understanding or risk perception. Method: We conducted a large-scale online experiment (N = hundreds of policy cases), sampling via the ToS;DR taxonomy and measuring outcomes along two validated dimensions: semantic comprehensibility and risk severity. Contribution/Results: We provide the first empirical evidence that 66% of simplified terms exhibit service-provider bias. Users consistently overestimate their comprehension while systematically underestimating platform-associated risks—revealing a “comprehension illusion.” This demonstrates the failure of current informed consent mechanisms in digital contexts. Our work advances a user-centered paradigm for digital policy design, grounded in cognitive science, offering both theoretical foundations and actionable design principles to enhance transparency and substantiate genuine consent.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

In general, Terms of Service (ToS) and other policy documents are verbose and full of legal jargon, which poses challenges for users to understand. To improve user accessibility and transparency, the"Terms of Service; Didn't Read"(ToS;DR) project condenses intricate legal terminology into summaries and overall grades for the website's policy documents. Nevertheless, uncertainties remain about whether users could truly grasp the implications of simplified presentations. We conducted an online survey to assess the perceived understandability and severity of randomly chosen cases from the ToS;DR taxonomy. Preliminary results indicate that, although most users report understanding the cases, they find a bias towards service providers in about two-thirds of the cases. The findings of our study emphasize the necessity of prioritizing user-centric policy formulation. This study has the potential to reveal the extent of information imbalance in digital services and promote more well-informed user consent.

Problem

• Evaluate user understanding of simplified policy documents
• Assess perceived bias in service provider policies
• Promote user-centric policy formulation in digital services

Innovation

• Simplified legal terminology summaries
• Online survey assess understandability
• User-centric policy formulation emphasis