Hello folks,
I need to start writing ToS and Privacy policy for my web apps. I need to know what are the things that I should be focussing on and the things I should never ignore.
Any reference articles that I can study on to write a perfect ToS and Privacy Policy?
I used https://termsfeed.com/ to create both the Terms & Conditions and the Privacy Policy for Feature Upvote. It is a paid service but way cheaper than using a lawyer.
Don’t do it yourself. Use one of the online generators if your business if fairly vanilla wrt to terms and privacy, or get a lawyer from https://upcounsel.com to customize their template for your use case. I went the lawyer route 4 years ago because the generators weren’t as well established then; it wasn’t as expensive as I was afraid it would be (~$500 IIRC) and it got the job done, but the doc quality wasn’t stellar either.
Where a lawyer really helps in the long term is if they get familiar with your business and can warn you about risks that you don’t even realize you don’t know about. It’s your call if/when to establish such a relationship, though – I didn’t until a couple years into running my business, and with a different lawyer than the one who wrote the terms and policy docs.
A privacy policy is more than just a dumb text you put on your website. If you store user data in your web apps you need to establish a privacy policy that governs your own actions as well of those of your employees (if any).
Even if it does not apply to you (most likely it does!), the European GDPR is a pretty good guide to get started. For a legal text it is pretty comprehensible and covers a lot of ground.