Everyone Should Have to Explain a Website's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to a Child

  It's amazing how much easier it is to keep track of what my children are doing in school, and how they're doing on it.Our school district uses a system called Power School, where his teachers post grades on homework and tests. I can spend about 5 minutes each week looking through each subject for both boys and get a solid handle on their overall progress. Waiting for report cards? Though we still get them and have to sign them, we don't need to wait to find out.Our school district has increased its use of other tools in the last couple of years, and my son had to sign up for Edmodo and Class Dojo accounts recently, and as he created his accounts on each platform, he turned to me and said, "It asks if I accept the privacy policy and the terms and conditions. Do I?"For a moment, I kind of wanted to say, "Sure! Just click 'accept.'" - I mean, they're well-known sites that work with schools all over the country. Their T&C have got to be reasonable, right?But I knew I had to go through them with my boy - that if he didn't learn now how important it was to learn what rights he had and what rights the sites had, he never would.So we opened the files and began to read.A thought: When you're writing legal policies for sites where one of your biggest user groups is children, it would really behoove you to have a simpler version of the T&C and privacy policy for those children. There's no way any elementary school child would be able to make heads or tails of these files - and it's good for parents to review them with their children in a language both can understand. And the length? If you save them as PDFs, the privacy policy is 9 pages and the T&C is 10.I know the real purpose of T&C and privacy policies is to shelter the site owners from legal liability. Whether the average person can understand them or not isn't really a consideration most of the time. But take Tumblr - its Terms of Service is filled with all the usual legalese, but each section is annotated with an explanation in plain English. It's brilliant, because it satisfies the lawyers, but also ensures that its users can actually understand what they're agreeing to.Even if you read only the annotations, you know what you're getting yourself into.Teaching my children how to be responsible on the Internet is something I think about a lot. They both have email addresses, but know the only email they can open without my husband or I present is from their grandparents. No Facebook accounts, no Instagram. They don't surf the Internet without an adult in the room. If they're playing a game with an option to interact with other players they don't know, they ask if it's OK first.They're good boys. But sheltering them from the Internet isn't going to teach them how to use it properly.So we went through the policies, paragraph by paragraph. I explained what it meant to him, emphasizing that, at their root, the message was that you're responsible for anything you put online. That we bear the ultimate responsibility for protecting ourselves and our information.Wide-eyed, my son looked at me and nodded. I explained that a lot of the language in the documents was aimed at teachers, who are able to access parts of Edmodo and Class Dojo that are inaccessible to students, but that he should understand how the site is used overall.But you know what? Reading these documents out loud and having to work through them with someone who needed really clear, plain English, was a great exercise. Reminded me how much trust we put in these sites we use every day. I don't say this to be all Henny Penny, "the sky is falling!" - but rather to remind us that we should pay attention to what we are doing online.In all honesty, I don't always read all the terms and conditions of sites I visit. I talked with some friends about this - very computer-savvy folks - and most admitted they don't, either.In fact, one friend who's an attorney recalled being taught in law school that you're more protected if you don't read the T&C if they're especially long and onerous, as it's considered unreasonable to expect you'd actually read them and/or understand them. Of course, my friend noted it had been some years since he'd been in law school and his memory might be faulty. And I'm not advocating that you don't read them - I have no idea what legal ramifications that might have. But the point is, even the most savvy among us often don't read them, so having hugely long and complicated T&C for a site for children seems a bit ridiculous.How often do you read Terms and Conditions (or Terms of Use, or Terms of Service, or End User License Agreements, or whatever else they're called depending on the site)? Next time you do, if you have kids, I'd recommend reviewing them with the little ones - it's a good exercise in seeing how much you really understand of the rights you're giving the site's owners.Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr Creative Commons.