I don’t know anyone who likes to read the fine print. I don’t know many people who can even interpret fine print so that it makes sense to us mere mortals.
Of course, they do that on purpose. All those pages upon pages of details, terms and conditions are important, but if companies make them hard to read (teeny tiny print, all caps, etc.), with long sentences and legal terms, most people just check the box that say, “Yeah sure, I read it” and get on with whatever they were doing. Which is exactly what the companies want you to do. They require these legal documents to limit or at least reduce their liability if something goes wrong. But some companies purposefully make their contracts longer and more difficult to understand than they need to be, to discourage you from reading them.
Secure Data Recovery has been in business since 2007. Their work is recovering data from hard drives, laptops, PCs/Macs, RAID, servers, SSD, cell phones, etc., and they say they have a 96% success rate, regardless of the cause of damage. Their website says “From single external hard drives, SSD’s, mobile devices to enterprise NAS, SAN, and RAID failures, we are ready to help recover from digital disasters, anywhere.”
Secure Data Recovery decided to look at the legal contracts for consumers from 100 different companies that spanned from travel to social media to healthcare to insurance and more. They wanted to see, of the ones they studied, which were the easiest and most difficult to maneuver, both in terms of length and ease of understanding.
Here’s their methodology:
On August 23, 2023, we analyzed the fine print for 100 major companies. Using the word count, we calculated how long it would take someone to read the text based on the average reading rate of an adult, 200 words per minute. Then, we used the Flesch Reading Ease Formula to calculate the reading difficulty for each company’s fine print. The formula provides a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating easier readability. To assign the score, it takes into account the sentence length and word length. The formula scores text using the following scale:
- 90–100: Very Easy
- 70–89: Easy
- 60–69: Fairly Easy
- 50–-59: Standard
- 30–49: Difficult
- 0–29: Very Difficult
To be fair we only looked at words in the fine print that would pertain to a typical customer and not a business customer. While we have taken measures to ensure the accuracy of these word counts, there may be slight variations in the actual word count.
Length
The length of fine print is a no brainer. It’s simply how long a document is. They based their respective fine print on how long it would take an average adult American, reading at 200 words per minute, to read the entire document.
The company with the longest fine print was AT&T. It had a word count of 56,615 words and would take the average American 4 hours and 43 minutes to read it. Kill me now LOL.
But AT&T isn’t a travel company ;-). Of the travel companies, this is where they ranked in the Top 100:
- #7: Airbnb – 23,585 words – 1 hour and 57 minutes
- #10: Lyft – 20,381 words – 1 hour and 41 minutes
- #21: VBRO – 15,643 words – 1 hour and 18 minutes
- #24: Booking.com – 14,449 – 1 hour and 12 minutes
- #43: Tripadvisor – 10,506 words – 52 minutes
- #61: Spirit Airlines – 7,856 words – 39 minutes
- #73: Uber – 5,763 words – 28 minutes
- #74: Southwest Airlines – 5,661 words – 28 minutes
- #97: United Airlines – 2,558 words – 12 minutes
- #98: Delta Air Lines – 1,731 words – 8 minutes
Of the 100 companies on Secure Data Recovery’s list, they fit into 10 different categories: dating, phone/insurance, finance, consumer services, shopping, travel, Tech/miscellaneous, music/TV streaming, social media and health/fitness.
Dating had the longest-to-read fine print average, with an average word count of 15,420 and a reading time of 1 hour and 17 minutes. Health/fitness had the shortest, with an average 6,501 words and a reading time of 32 minutes. Travel companies came right towards the middle, with an average word count of 10,536, which would take 52 minutes to read.
You can see the entire list here:
Difficulty
Another problem with the fine print of many companies is they write everything in "legalese," which, as I said earlier, makes it difficult for non-lawyers to understand what's being said. From Secure Data Recovery:
...To find out just how difficult, we ran each company’s fine print through a formula that determined the difficulty of the text.
Using the Flesch Reading Ease Formula, each company’s text was provided a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating easier readability. To assign the score, the formula takes into account the sentence length and word length. Along with a score, the formula provides a label from a scale of very easy to very difficult.
The company that was the most confusing to read was, surprise!, a travel company. Tripadvisor, to be exact. It had a Flesch Reading Ease score of 25, and was "Very Difficult" (as per the scale) to read.
Here's where the other travel companies ranked:
- #11: Southwest Airlines - Flesch Reading Ease score: 30 (Difficult)
- #26: VBRO - Flesch Reading Ease score: 37 (Difficult)
- #31: Lyft - Flesch Reading Ease score: 38 (Difficult)
- #33: United Airlines - Flesch Reading Ease score: 39 (Difficult)
- #71: Uber - Flesch Reading Ease score: 44 (Difficult)
- #83: Airbnb - - Flesch Reading Ease score: 48 (Difficult)
- #87: Spirit Airlines - Flesch Reading Ease score: 49 (Difficult)
- #95: Delta Air Lines - Flesch Reading Ease score: 50 (Difficult)
- #100: Booking.com - Flesch Reading Ease score: 62 (Fairly Easy)
You can see the entire list on this page of Secure Data Recovery's website.
Of course, it's important to read the fine print before you agree to things. Unfortunately, companies make reading that fine print particularly difficult. Some of them, apparently more than others (with a solid side-eye given to Airbnb & Southwest Airlines for scoring the worst.
Feature Photo (cropped): Marco Verch Professional ... / flickr / CC BY 2.0 DEED (older version)
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