Terms, Conditions and Timeouts
Today I logged into my online bank and was confronted with a new page containing some new and rather complex Terms and Conditions. I started to read them, but found the going tedious. My bank doesn’t generally try to pull the wool over my eyes, so I doubted there would be anything to be worried about. Nevertheless, I did a “select-all/copy” before I clicked “Accept”, so that I could examine this latest bundle of legal mumbo-jumbo at my leisure.
For security reasons, the bank site uses a short session timeout of just a few minutes. Out of curiosity, I later decided to time how long it would take me to give the legal text the attention it deserves. From start to finish, it took me 9 minutes to read these new Terms and Conditions. I can only conclude that if I had taken the time to read them when the bank Web site originally presented them to me, my online connection to the bank would have timed out and clicking “Accept” would have failed.
This leads me to conclude that the bank designed their Web site with the expectation that (most of) their customers would not read the legal text, but would instead blindly click the “Accept” button. Just like I did. No doubt this is exactly how they tested the site.
There’s something rather uncomfortable about all this.
Categorised as: Legal and Political