“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
This, in effect, nullifies all but the most important components of a Tos.
I wholly agree.
But we're quickly approaching (and in some cases, past) the point where proper due diligence requires a 4-year post-secondary education in a related CS field, if not more.
We're talking about products that take multiple domain experts several years of collaboration to create. How is it reasonable to expect my mechanic, accountant, etc. to do their due diligence on how that product processes their data, especially when it's processed in a black-box created by several other domain experts, and their only source of information is purposefully opaque terms written by lawyers?
I don't think that's the case here or indeed very commonly. You don't necessarily have to understand implementation details if some core tenet of popular ethics is being violated. One key feature of the domain -- namely that you don't own "your data" and so you don't get to decide what happens with it -- is pretty clearly in violation of principles that the vast majority of Westerners would at least profess to hold. Beyond the motivating principle that third parties should be required to receive explicit whitelist access to use privately-owned data, "implementation details" refers mostly to policy and enforcement, not really technologies.
Perhaps instead of pinning all of the blame on users, we could have the companies producing labyrinthian ToS contracts written by top-grade lawyers and full of legalese (that no layperson should be expected to understand) shoulder at least some of the blame?
This doesn't even touch on the fact that many topics (as related to data aggregation and privacy) are highly technical and require at least a few years of post-secondary to even begin wrapping your head around (e.g. de-anonymization via large sparse datasets is not something I can reasonably teach my 85-year old parent, nor to my child, both of which use Google services in some capacity).
But, yes... Let's blame it on Average Joe, who just wants to watch their dog for a few minutes while at work and saw an ad on TV about a convenient way to do so. Shame on them for not being both a lawyer and a CS graduate.