Social media terms and conditions are way too complex, say UK MPs

A UK parliamentary committee has attacked the terms and conditions used by social media services, declaring that they are too complex for users to understand.

It said the unsuitability of the T&Cs had been demonstrated by episodes such as Facebook’s emotion-manipulation study, in which Facebook deliberately made some of its users sad as an experiment. A report by the Science and Technology Committee called on the British government and data protection regulator to develop terms that can actually help users understand how their data is being used. It’s great to see more of a political push for this -- there are already grassroots initiatives to help people understand what the services they use do with their data, such as Terms Of Service, Didn’t Read, but they’re not widely known about. The committee also asked the government to work with business and academia to make sure that apps only request the user data that they need to provide the advertised service, and to better explain to users why they need the permissions they request.