Privacy Lawyer Simplifies Instagram’s Terms Of Use

The Children’s Commissioner of England found that Instagram’s 5,000-word terms of use is written at a post-graduate level, and that a group of teens asked to interpret the terms couldn’t make sense of them. “You have to take about 10 minutes on each sentence,” a 13-year-old boy complained. Sentences like: “You must not defame, stalk, bully, abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate people or entities and you must not post private or confidential information via the Service, including, without limitation, your or any other person’s credit card information, social security or alternate national identity numbers, non-public phone numbers or non-public email addresses.” Privacy lawyer Jenny Afia, a partner with Schillings, took a crack at rewriting that phrase, and boiled it down to: “Don’t bully anyone or post anything horrible about people,” she wrote. “Don’t post other peoples’ private or personal information.” The report found that the same group of teens could read Afia’s reworked terms just fine.