For UX Magazine: In 2012 Instagram’s revised terms of service ignited outrage, quite a few account deletions and, in some extreme cases, reasonable discussion. What the revision did not do was provide clarity or set expectations.
Terms of service (or terms and conditions) are important and necessary, but they’re also largely inaccessible. Attorneys write them to protect the intellectual and material rights of their clients (the software vendors) and do so in the parlance of the legal system. In a court of law, these terms make sense. On a website intended to be read by non-lawyer humans [insert hacky “lawyers aren’t humans” joke here], these terms are gibberish.
