Once upon a time, there was a global social media giant…
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Someone has made a website which allows visitors to listen to the full terms and conditions from top social media platforms.
A tonic for even the most hardened insomniacs, the page invites listeners to “lull yourself to sleep with the soothing white noise of your favourite tech giant’s terms of service.”
Both TikTok’s and Instagram’s terms of service are available with a full transcript interspersed with sleepy imagery of clouds in the night sky.
The TikTok version is nearly 38 minutes long and the Instagram version stretches to 51 minutes. The intro instructs listeners: “Close your eyes, drift away, or scroll down to join the 1% of technology users that claim to have read em’ from beginning to end.”
The page is a project called “Terms of Service for Legal Lullabies” from The Lazy Data Research Institute (TLDR-Institute). Its purpose is to highlight the “intentionally vague, long and boring language” used in terms and conditions that leads to many not knowing how their personal data is being used by online services.