Terms of services and Privacy Policies as legal documents are a pain for everyone.
When you create a web service you must offer those declarations (like in the screenshot below) and have your users agree with you before going any further. This protects you as a company and them against any misuse or abuse of your service and is an opportunity to lay transparently your practices in terms of data collection, data privacy, conflict resolution etc...
The only problem? no one really cares to read them. And even worse, it is a real pain for the startup executives to write them. Usually those are outsourced to a law firm, that will charge you too mych for it, and if no budget is allocated, to the in-house marketing/copyrighter that has to gather the relevant points and translate them into 2 documents that will be posted online.
The pain grows over time since any change on the site that has to do with data collection (meaning nearly anything) has to be reflected and therefore updated. And still no one cares to read. Not that this is not important. But it is just a painful and boring thing to do. Not mentioning it is hardly visible.
Many times, young services just try to solve the issue by spotting related or competing services and copy/paste the Terms and Privacy Policy on their site (which can be funny since sometimes they even leave the original name of the company)
To summarize: those docs suck, no one wants to write them, update them and worse read them. However those are very important specially in the case of conflict, just like a contract.
Here is an idea i suggest
A simple service (codename TERMS4ALL) that offers tailored templates of terms of services and privacy policy. This is how it works
- Your company answers a series of list of questions on your activity and company details.
- Your can also relate to an existing business to find Terms already published that are close to you
- Then you get a pre-templated document you can edit
- The output is composed of 2 parts: a true legal document and a hyper friendly summary that is readable, short and understandable to the users
- The service offers a tracker for company exects to monitor their competition but also for users to know what's new (someone has done it but only for BIG cos and more for legal purpose)
The model is highly simple: companies have to pay to get that. Something like 500 USD for each doc per year. Why per year? Because you need to update your docs as your service grows and adds new features and expands to new geo areas
SOMEONE PLEASE BUILD THIS COMPANY. i am your first customer
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