Beyond Avoidance and Passivity: Novel UIs to Make Terms of Service Comprehensible

Terms of Service (ToS) agreements are typically written to satisfy corporate legal requirements rather than user understanding. Users are often deeply dissatisfied with online ToS agreements, which they typically find incomprehensible. Nevertheless, users frequently agree to the ToS, potentially surrendering their data and rights. We therefore designed alternative ways of presenting existing ToS documents using crowdsourced sentiment highlighting, to make documents more readable. This highlighting visualizes different sections of the agreement as positive or negative. We evaluated the visualization, finding that participants recognized highlighted information better, and most participants praised the visualization. We discuss design implications and the next steps for more interactive ToS.