Ask HN: Is it wrong to not have a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy on your site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it wrong to not have a Terms of Use and Privacy Policy on your site?

8 pointsthrowaway30584 comments

Our website doesn't have a privacy policy or terms of use pages.

Don't get me wrong, we won't ever share emails, ip addresses of our users or anything. We don't even send newsletters, though it seems like everyone else does, since we consider it cheap spam.

But we don't have it written out on our site anywhere, for a couple reasons.

1. How does one prove the terms that they agreed on in the event of a conflict. Say you have a policy page that randomly changes versions on every visit. It could say either 'We (will|won't) share your email' each time it is loaded. What then? Which version of the document did you agree with.

2. Following the extra comma fiasco, where one company lost millions of dollars because a comma was added in the contract where it shouldn't have been. Why put something on the web which in essence...can only hurt you?

With no terms of service, you are free to do whatever you like (within reason/confines of the law) - adding an extra contract just makes you vulnerable since you are agreeing to things that maybe a great lawyer could find a hole in.

We don't have a ToS or Privacy Policy for those reasons, is that wrong?

We wrote our own, and in 'plain' language, not in legalese. So far it has not ever come up other than when users violate the 'terms' and are banned.

Feel free to copy bits and pieces:

http://ww.com/policy.php3

And keep in mind that a privacy policy only starts to carry real weight when your community feels that a policy is too restrictive or gives you rights that it should not have. A 'reasonable' level of protection of privacy and rights is the sweet spot to aim for.

Too lax and you won't be able to ban users for terms-of-service violations, too restricted and your users will (rightfully) complain.

Not directly replying to your question, but maybe you can find something on the link below (if no one will reply with some insight):

http://searchyc.com/terms+of+use

Edit: If you have a big community website, a startup/company operating trough the website, you may need a ToS and privacy policy. You can at least "assemble" one like I did back in 2008 with my company, enterprise market. So I got relevant pieces from Google (especially the privacy policy), Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk too, etc, and adapted it to my business.

"Don't get me wrong, we won't ever share emails, ip addresses of our users or anything."

And I believe you. But if your assets go into a Chapter 7 liquidation, any such intent or formal privacy policy promise goes out the door (or so is my understanding, although we may see some change here someday).

(Or your angel investors might turn out out to be devils, etc., but Chapter 7 is the one risk that nearly impossible to avoid.)

Is there any sign you are losing people due to the lack of a formal privacy policy?

Is there any sign that many people care about the usual impenetrable privacy policies? And how they can be changed without notice?

How many people care that Facebook's motto/MO seems to be the opposite of Googles? Yes, they are big enough there's sometimes a lot of fuss when they do evil, but has it really hurt them?

Personally, I'm looking for a (very possibly implicit) "we won't be jerks and we expect you not to be" social contract. A one liner "we will not share ..." can't hurt, though (I do like to see those), but I'd drop the "never" due to the above control problem that might make it impossible to keep.

Automattic has licensed their TOS and Privacy Policy under creative commons. So anyone are free to copy and modify it.

http://en.wordpress.com/tos/

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