Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 5m 1,215 #legalpolicy
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Why You Should Write Your Own Legal Policy
There are at least a dozen generators out there and a hundred companies willing to write your legal jargon for you when it comes to your company or your website. There are still plenty of companies and websites who fail to have a write-up on their policies regarding their business practices or products, which is not recommended practice. Whether a startup, a small business, a booming medium-size company, or a ginormous corporation, policies on how everything is done and should be done is necessary for the possibility of a thriving organization.
In terms of this article, we will focus on two specific areas that should be on your website, regardless of whether you are a company or a blogger, a Terms of Service (TOS, Terms of Use, Terms of Usage, Terms, etc.) and a Privacy Policy are probably the two most important things you can have, aside from your About page and Product page. These two pages tell a customer, client, a legal entity, or government organization how your company does business, what you care about most, and insight into how you deliver your message. Without these two pages, your company could say a lot without saying anything at all, but it is the message that lies within these two important pages that provides insight into the organization as a whole.
Your TOS and Privacy policies are windows into how your company operates, what it does, what type of information it collects, uses, and shares, what it does to protect itself against itself and others, and how it protects others against its own practices. These pages are as important as your About page, Company page, and Product pages. The TOS serves as the binding agreement or contract between the visitor or customer on the website or e-commerce store and the company. It serves the purpose of making all parties involved aware of the legalities involved when things do not always go right, and what it will do to ensure it remains on a professional with whomever the company does business with.
A Privacy policy is a statement of the practices a company follows to ensure privacy within itself and for those whom it does business with, including complete disclosure of what type of information the company gathers from the visitor or customer such as name, email, phone number, address, credit card information, shopping habits, and even the length of time on the website and the analytical patterns it may use to understand shoppers.
Both usually contain the legal jargon necessary, but the legal jargon should be easy for anyone to understand. Taking the Free Readability Test Tool and scoring between a level 7 and 9 is where you want to be. While it might seem better to use more advanced and “big words”, it is not as appropriate as you might think. Assume that your audience is of some intelligence, college education, but unless your website is dedicated to law, than keep your TOS and Privacy Policy simple to understand. Try to write short sentences and get to the immediate point. The faster your readers can get through it and actually understand it, the better.
When it comes to your TOS and Privacy Policy, you want your visitors or customers to understand and trust you. These two policies establish that trust, but they need to be set in easy-to-read terms. The harder these policies are to read, the less trusted your company is. Unfortunately, for some companies, it is not easy to keep it short and sweet. For example, have you ever read a Apple or Microsoft policy, ever? Me either. I just scroll down to activate the “understand” button so I could move on. Who has 20 minutes to read a policy? They could write anything and no one would even notice. We probably all sold our soul. We definitely sold our information for free.
I am pretty positive that even the President does not read everything that comes across his desk and he has a few advisers who give him the shorten versions. We all know for damn sure that Congress hardly reads anything and they probably judge the bill by its title and summary. That is why they get paid the big bucks, isn’t it? There are people that love to read everything and then there are people who want the Cliff’s Notes. Sometimes getting the Cliff’s Notes is dangerous because you are relying on someone else’s interpretation of what they got from it. The whole point is to keep your TOS and Privacy policy easy to understand and fast to read. It should not take more than 5 minutes to get through your legal jargon.
In my research for this article, I discovered that there are plenty of websites out there that hopped on board and totally agreed with me about keeping it short and simple. Check out the follow links examples of short privacy policies:
http://www.shortestroute.in/privacy_policy.php
http://www.shorter.edu/privacy-policy/
There was also a site that no longer exists, but was boasted as having a short and simple easy-to-understand privacy policy, so in searching further, I was able to recover its privacy page:
Here are a few samples links of short and easy-to-read TOS links:
http://grandpashorters.com/terms-of-service/
https://www.browserstack.com/terms
There is a service called “Didn’t Read Terms of Service” that actually summarizes the TOS for you of the major social media websites and other popular websites with long TOS, ranking them based on what is good and what is bad about each one. While it is true that the legal responsibility you take on, the longer your TOS policy will probably be. However, if there is a way to shorten it, and make it read so a 9th grader could understand it, than your policy will be understood by most people. If there is any bit of confusion, in any part of the TOS, than scrap the paragraph or area and re-write it so that it is easier to understand.
The less confusion, the better and more understood your company will be. Straightforward and to the point with very little confusing legal jargon will not only help your customers out, but you and any potential lawyers that you may hire. You will barely have to explain yourself or your rules, a lawyer will easily understand, and so will your customer, client, or visitor. Depending on the business, try to keep your TOS and Privacy policies as short as possible. Say a lot and say it in a few paragraphs. People will read it and appreciate such a service.
Feel free to go researching TOS and privacy policies. There are no rules that state you cannot take some influence from the policies of others. It is frowned upon if you decide to plagiarize and copy word-for-word, especially if the TOS or privacy policy is unique to the specific website, but coming up with your own will make you and/or your company stand out from the normal policies. Try to be different when it comes to those unique terms documents. If your policies look different and read different, they will probably be remembered more than your average TOS or Privacy policy.
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