CAMBRIDGE, MA — A comprehensive new study published Monday by the Whitmore Institute for Quantitative Textual Burden at Northeastern Ohio Polytechnic found that the combined Terms and Conditions, End User License Agreements, Privacy Policies, and Cookie Consent Acknowledgments accepted by American internet users in the past calendar year contain approximately 4.2 billion words — surpassing the total preserved written output of human civilization, none of which anyone is getting to either.

The study, titled You Agreed To This, calculated that the average American accepted 1,400 digital agreements in 2024, requiring — if read at a standard pace — roughly 76,000 hours of continuous reading per person, or approximately eight and a half years, assuming no bathroom breaks and a complete absence of anything else to do.

"We are now generating unread legal text faster than we ever generated unread literary text," said Dr. Fenwick Pruall, the Institute's Senior Fellow in Consent Architecture and Implied Obligation. "This is, historically speaking, a new kind of achievement. Shakespeare produced 884,000 words over his lifetime. A single updated privacy policy from a mid-tier coupon app now covers that in an afternoon."

"To be clear, no one has read Shakespeare either. But at least we've had four hundred years to feel bad about it."

The Library of Congress, which houses approximately 170 million items and 17 million books, confirmed that its collection is also largely unread, and expressed mild institutional solidarity with the Terms and Conditions corpus. A spokesperson for the Library noted that the two bodies of text differ primarily in that the Library of Congress does not require you to click "I Agree" before being ignored.

Researchers noted several complicating factors in their methodology. Chief among them: the agreements themselves kept updating mid-study, adding volume each time a company "made some changes to better serve you." The study's word count had to be revised upward eleven times between January and the time of publication, and twice more during the peer review process.

Tech industry representatives pushed back on the findings, arguing that the agreements exist to inform and protect users. Brynn Castellane, Vice President of Transparent User Empowerment at a digital wellness platform that tracks your sleep, location, emotional state, and refrigerator contents, said the length of agreements reflects legal necessity rather than intent to overwhelm.

"Every word is there for a reason," Castellane said, "and users are always free to read them."

She added that users who proceed without reading implicitly agree that they have read them, a clause that appears on page 47 of the agreement governing the study itself, which the research team had accepted in order to use the software that compiled the data, and had not read.

The Whitmore Institute plans to release a follow-up report later this year. The report will be accompanied by a 34-page terms of use agreement for accessing it.