Weekend Frivolity: Who’s Attacking Me Now?

Back when Stephen Colbert was heroically hosting The Colbert Report, he had a segment called “Who’s Attacking Me Now.”  Here’s an example.  I would love to have a similar segment on the blog, but people don’t attack the blog that often.  Still, it happened recently (while I was on hiatus, the cowards!).

I gave an interview for an article about plain-language contract drafting.  I had a long conversation with the reporter, in which I acknowledged that one should try to write contracts so that people can understand them and also acknowledged that most people who draft contracts work with forms, and changing the form is risky and takes longer, which makes the process more expensive.  And then I segued to talk about what seems to me to be the more important problems with the world of contracting today.  People don’t read contracts because: (1) yes, they are incomprehensible, but also; (2) they are long; (3) they are contracts of adhesion, so even if you don’t like something in the contract, you can’t bargain for better language; and (4) life is short and the stakes in most contracts seem small ex ante.  Omri Ben-Shahar (left) is cited in the same story for the proposition that “simplifying these contracts would do nothing to protect consumers, especially when they’re up against ‘a powerful, well-advised, sophisticated company.'”

I was then attacked as a “proponent of tested contract language.”  Omri escaped unscathed!  Well, I suppose the shoe fits, but I thought what I said was a little more nuanced than that.  When I returned from hiatus, I went to the comments section of the blog in which I was attacked so that I could take one thing attributed to the author in a blogpost edited by someone else and treat it as the sum total of his essence.  But first, being a cautious person, I checked out his website’s privacy policy.  

It is in pristine ordinary language.  I cut and pasted it into a Word document.  It consists of over 2500 words, which makes it ten pages long.  It links to the privacy pages of three “partners.”  Here’s what the privacy policy says about them:

We do not share your Personal Data with strangers. Personal Data about you is in some cases provided to our trusted partners in order to either make providing the service to you possible or to enhance your customer experience. We share your data with:

Our processing partners:

• Akismet – Automattic, Inc.

• Disqus, Inc.

• MadMimi – GoDaddy

Hmm.  They may be “trusted partners” to you, but they are strangers to me.  Of course, by the time I read that far into the policy, the website was already sharing my information with its trusted partners.  And even if I took the time to read the ten-page privacy policy with care as well as the privacy policies of the three partners, to which the privacy policy provided links, and any other vital document to which the privacy policy linked or which it referenced, the privacy policy ends as follows:

“We reserve the right to make change to this Privacy Policy.”

If a user of the website read that far, they would have no difficulty understanding the words.  But perhaps ease of understanding the contract’s language is not its biggest problem.