Apple users are (probably) liars…

Earlier this year we blogged about the CEO of Yahoo telling a lie on his CV. Whilst a number of you no doubt thought this was very bad, here’s a nice ethical question for you – have you lied recently?

My guess is that you have. Now before you get all righteous about it I think that you probably did it without even thinking.

Wow, this is pretty worrying isn’t it? A lot of you are studying for professional exams and if I’m here saying that you have lied without thinking about it then what does that mean for your profession going forward?

Terms and conditions (or T&Cs) are essential for companies which are operating on the Internet. For example, they clarify the relationship between the user and the supplier and make it clear what it provided. In reality, the chances are that they also limit the liability of the provider!

As well as having some great products, Apple also has a pretty significant set of T&Cs.

The consumer watchdog organisation “Which”, has recently released a report which criticises the length of some T&Cs.

For any of you that have loaded the Apple iTunes software onto your computer then in theory you should have read their terms and conditions. After all, you had to tick that you agreed with them.

The T&Cs of Apple iTunes reaches a staggering 19,972 words. To put this into perspective, there are more words in the Apple iTunes Terms & Conditions than there are in Shakespeare’s famous play Macbeth (if you’re interested, a mere 18,110 words).

For those of you that are fans of Shakespeare you may prefer Hamlet to Macbeth. If you’re interested, Hamlet has a total word count of 30,066.

If you’ve ever used PayPal then you would have agreed with their terms and conditions. If you had in fact read their terms and conditions then it would have taken you more time than it would have taken you to read Hamlet as the PayPal T&Cs have a phenomenal 36,275 words – 6,209 words more than Hamlet…