Recent developments in terms of cookie regulation in the EU have had the unexpected effect of increasing the reading speed of European internet users by more than 600 times.
Yes, you heard that right: cookies increase our reading speed exponentially.
How is that possible, you might say?
Easy.
Before the cookie regulation anyone could search on google anything, let’s say “cooking mushrooms” and open each and every interesting page on a new tab.
Then you had to visit each one of those pages 1 by 1 and read or scan the page if it solved your need by teaching how you can cook mushrooms.
That’s much faster than doing the same, let’s say in the 80’s, in a library where you had to find 20 different books, get each one of them, search the index and go to the specific page.
But this didn’t change substantially your reading speed.
But now something has changed.
Now, every user can open each page and quickly locate the message that says “I’ve read and accept the cookies and privacy policy”, do it and mark the checkbox to accept the notification.
So, if you mark the checkbox in 2 seconds, this means you’ve read the policy in 2 seconds. Right?
That’s what we’re legally saying.
Considering that the average policy is 2500 words this means you can read half of that per second or 150000 words per minute. That’s much faster than the good reading speed of 250 words a minute.
In fact it’s 600 times faster.
Wow!
In fact there’s a Guinness World Record on legal reading speed that can process 40 different policies in less than 26.2 seconds.
Unbelievably some legal courts are starting to doubt about the validity of people reading and accepting those terms so fast. In fact they consider that, unless the visitor can prove he’s able to read at this high speed in front of the Court then the acceptance is not valid. And the visitor or the website owner or any third party can make a claim regarding the improper access to the information according to the EU rules.
But do not worry!
EU is already working on a solution.
They have created a committee that is studying the situation and had prepared a first draft. This draft, that has already been sent to the 27 countries and it’s waiting for their revision.
The proposal works as follows:
Whenever a visitor opens the first page on a website he hasn’t visited before the company is required to inform the user about their rights ang get the acceptance.
With the new version the text of the cookies and privacy policy should appear on the same page (a link to a third page is no longer valid) and the site has to scroll the text line by line at a maximum speed of 250 words per minute. This means that a typical policy of 2500 words would require 10 minutes. When the user arrives to the end he or she should be able to accept or not the terms.
If the user accepts and to prove he has understood the terms, he’ll be presented with a quiz of 10 questions with 4 possible answers each. The user has to achieve a minimum of 8 correct answers before receiving access to the content.
According to the EU committee this system will ensure that the EU citizen rights are properly protected.
So, if you’re interested in setting a new Guinness World Record in fast legal reading the you’ll have to hurry.
Well, really you don’t have hurry too much.
Because when the EU Committee receives the answers from the 27 countries, by the end of next year, and publishes the final version there will be 5 years until the 27 countries can adapt their local regulations plus 1 additional year so that websites owners can adapt their content to the new regulation.
And if you’re thinking that maybe in 8 years the cookies may have disappeared, they have us covered too.
The EU committee has included all possible terms in the specifications including cookies, cakes, brownies, puddings, croissants and ensaimadas.