How is this for an understatement?

Subscribers aren't keen on reading through the fine print at the bottom, and they'll feel betrayed if they click through to your site only to learn that the special offer isn't valid on what they want to buy. (from Exceptions* Apply: Keeping Your Legal Text Quick and Cool, an article in Email Insider).

Actually it is a pretty good article which makes a number of common sense points about legal disclaimers in various special offers. 

But the point that it really makes, although the article does not say it, is that you need quantity of disclosure (that is all the right disclosures) and quality of disclosure (that is the disclosure has to be user friendly).  Quality of disclosure is really important because it generates confidence in, and comfort with, the site.

I have written about this sort of thing before.  In my post, More on Privacy and Flash Cookies, I noted that one of the claims in the law suit against Specific Media was that their disclosures are opaque.  Here is what the article I was discussing actually says, “The company's "privacy documents require college-level reading skills for comprehension and include substantial legalese, ambiguous and obfuscated language designed to confuse, disenfranchise, and mislead the users," the lawsuit asserts. “

This sort of obfuscation goes a long way to creating that creepy feeling of being used and undermining confidence in the system. 

As many people have pointed out, if you want a “free” internet, providers of content have to be able to make money somehow, and (as in broadcast TV) advertising is the easy answer.  The more people participate in the system and the better information advertisers have about the participants, the more value there is in the system and the more robust a set of “free” offerings the system will support. 

That does not mean turning big brother loose and creeping everybody out.  To the contrary, it argues for a clear set of well articulated and well understood standards that give users confidence in the sites they visit.