Updating Your Outdated Terms of Use

You just looked at your business website’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (I’ll use the word Terms to refer to both of them together) for the first time in ages and realized that they have been in place since the Clinton Administration. It’s time for an update. What do you need to consider?

Don’t copy and paste. Terms should be tailored to your website. Your site will need different terms depending on whether you accept posts from users, how you want users to be able to use the site, what kinds of information you collect from users, whether you wish to allow sharing, and more. If you merely find a website similar to your own and copy its Terms, you risk creating Terms that you do not wish to bind your users, let alone your business.

Follow any requirements for your industry. If you are in an industry that is subject to regulations, you should make sure that your site’s Terms allow you to follow those regulations. For example, some industries are required to keep certain records about customer interactions for a certain amount of time. Make sure that your Terms disclose that you are keeping those records, and for how long.

The FTC regulates privacy policies. The Federal Trade Commission has been very aggressive about enforcement of privacy policies for the past few years, and it updates its regulations fairly regularly. Make sure your attorney looks at the latest regulations in drafting your Privacy Policy.

State laws. If your website is aimed at residents of more than one state, make sure you are complying with the laws of every state you are doing business in. California has generally been the most aggressive state in terms of legal regulation of website Terms.

Consider your timing. Pinterest has recently become a very popular site. If you want to, for example, update your Terms to allow you to share your users’ content via Pinterest, you will have to choose your timing carefully. If your current Terms do not grant the license needed for such sharing, you will need to make sure that your users are bound by your updated Terms before you add a “Pin It!” button or other means of sharing to your site. Otherwise, you may be risking a law suit for facilitating the violation of your users’ copyrights.

Inform your users of the update—email them if you can. It has become more and more common for websites to provide some notice before changes to their Terms go into effect. One might even say it is swiftly becoming a standard practice in the industry, especially for social sites. Facebook has a Site Governance Page where users can learn about and weigh in on changes before they are made. Pinterest gave its users more than two weeks’ notice, both by email and by notice on the Pinterest website, that it was going to make changes to its Terms of Service (and still makes the old terms available on the site in case users want to know how they have changed). Google gave users more than a month to review the changes it made to the Terms for its many services, informing them via pop-up when they visited a Google site as well as via email. If at all possible, you should take similar steps to inform your users of your changes. You don’t want your business to be left behind, if for no other reason than your users will expect this level of service.

Updating your Terms requires some consideration, but can be a painless process with the proper planning.