We've determined that our website needs a privacy policy and a terms of use page to protect our interests. Are there automated tools that will generate these for us? How do we go about creating these parts of the website?
6 Answers
The Better Business Bureau Online has a Sample Privacy Notice which is as good as any in terms of a simple, but thorough policy. It has these sections:
- Our Commitment To Privacy
- The Information We Collect
- How We Use Information
- Our Commitment To Data Security
- Our Commitment To Children's Privacy
- How To Access Or Correct Your Information
- How To Contact Us
Here's another one, from a apps.gov site, with these headings:
- Information Collected and Stored Automatically
- If You Provide Personal Information
- Cookies
- Links to Other Sites
- Children’s Privacy
- Internet Security
- Changes to this Policy
Those two together should give you a solid template. If you store and collect more data, be clear about the data retention and reselling policies and you might think about putting together something more like an End User License Agreement.
The excellent resouce artlung provided to the BBB website link is now moved. This was the closest thing I could find: http://www.bbb.org/us/WWWRoot/SitePage.aspx?site=70&id=a17891ea-ce8e-48d7-a27a-e6d2e5833cea
Linked within is a set of tips on how to create your privacy policy: http://www.bbbonline.org/UnderstandingPrivacy/PMRC/createpolicy.asp
You may also find the Fair Information Practice Principals at the FTC interesting.
Updating with some new answers, since the law is changing fast in this area: Docracy has open sourced its own terms and various privacy policies specific to mobile apps, annotations included. We also published a drafting guide. Other companies that famously allow intelligent copying of their terms are Quora and Wordpress. There are some free and paid privacy policy assemblers available online, I personally like privacychoice.org and iubenda.com.
Disclosure: I work for Docracy
If you have a legal team (but you don't, or you wouldn't be asking) check with them. I have honestly just taken and modified the terms from sites that are similar to mine.
While I don't know of any automated tools, I don't think the TOS on a site varies much from one to the other unless you have some pretty unique public content. When we were deploying sites the boilerplate we used didn't change more than half the time.
We got ours from here. It's customised and was cheap(er than getting a legal team to do it for us).
answered Jul 9, 2010 at 2:24
