"I Agreed to WHAT?!" Re-envisioning License Agreements and P

Google Tech Talk
May 12, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Michael Terry (mterry@cs.uwaterloo.ca)

License agreements and privacy statements are common features of software and software services, but less than 2% of the population actually read them. While many companies have little motivation to compel users to read such agreements, there are nonetheless times when it is advantageous to effectively communicate legal terms to one's user base.

In this talk, I present results from research redesigning the software license agreement process. In this work, we explored alternative interaction designs as well as new visual designs. Our most successful result, a Textured Agreement, is a visually redesigned software agreement that captures people's attention, conveys the personal relevance of the content, and increases the ease with which one can navigate and read the agreement. Results from an experimental study show that this design significantly increases reading time and is preferred by users. Furthermore, our data indicate these results are not simply due to the novelty of the design, but, rather, due to the particular set of design elements chosen. Our study also sheds light on the efficacy of providing summaries, an oft-proposed means of addressing the license agreement problem. In our experiment, we found that users read summaries, but then ignore the full agreement, a result that cautions against their use in practice.

Michael Terry is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. His research focuses on developing, deploying, and evaluating new tools to support usability needs in open source software development. He received a BS from Cornell University, a MS from Florida Tech, and a PhD from Georgia Tech.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• license
• agreements
• privacy

[needle444]

I opend a new tab and watched this to about 15:00 and... I just realized I could be listening to music instead -.-"

[AboveTrans]

Interesting video. But they are missing one point. The reason why licence agreements are so long and boring, with the least important parts (types of damages awarded) CAPITALIZED, is to obfuscate the most important parts: "we give you something, but we are going to steal your content, you have no rights and we have all, unless local laws prevent us, we will sell your last bone to whoever pays, and we are here to screw you, you dumb customer, as you will never read it in the first place, ha ha."

[poliklosio]

Just to make it clear - legal statements in the license will never tell you directly what are they intended to mean in your specific use case. Its like a source code which you will never be able to read well enough to be sure what a computer is going to do when it executes the code. Their work is important, but the best thing on a page with a license is a link to a forum where there is a guy who answers specific questions. Their approach will never be good enough and its a bit annoying.

[poliklosio]

@angelwhite - "But, they are so daunting and so esotericly worded, that they become enigmatic" That's the whole point - when you first install the program you don't know what the license statements are for. You need something different - an interpretation or a knowledge about somebody else's experience to make sure that you want to install the program. The details of license are needed, but later. And often you run the installer more than once - you will not read everything again!

[angelwhite]

That isn't necessarily true, a lot of times an application collects more information than I think it should, and I start to try to read the legal agreement to figure out why. But, they are so daunting and so esotericly worded, that they become enigmatic. Even if I actually read it all the way through, I would not understand what it means. So I just choose fake info as often as possible, and agree by default. I think what they are doing is very worthwhile, if you care about your privacy.

[poliklosio]

I think that they are heavily missing the point, because most people simply have the reason not to read the agreement. They know what the typical use case of the application is, they know that its copyrighted and they accept that, so the precise terms are irrelevant to them. Only later they may need to read it sometimes. Maybe we should make the installation licenses easily recognisable (grey, formal looking), because its what most users really want They like be able to skip them quickly.

[j3robins]

The TV in the background is trippy.

[ZerqTM]

Meh All you need its a wacom board X3

[XxThizizExtremexX]

hey google here is a tip for ur video is make the begging with music like i dont know eminem Lp i dont know