Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy have you got it right

Terms and Conditions plus Privacy policy, have you got this right for your websites. If you sell a product or service, if you collect personnel information, if you're an affiliate, then you must have robust terms and conditions, plus a solid privacy policy. These are a no brainer you must have them.

Why do you need terms and conditions?

Terms and conditions are a legally binding contract between you and your website visitor. They detail what your website visitor must comply with to have access to your website. The five main reasons you must have terms and conditions for your website are:

1. Prevent illegal activity
2. Protect your content
3. Marketing requirements
4. Complying with laws
5. Set the governing law

Prevent illegal activity

Your terms and conditions act similar to the deterrent of a lock. They let your visitor know what is and is not allowed to be done on your website. Limits your liability from unscrupulous site visitors.

Protect your content

You as the site owner have intellectual property rights over the content on your site. Your terms and condition advise visitors of the actions that may be applied to the content on your site. This means if your terms and conditions state the conditions under which a piece of intellectual property can be shared, then your visitor can use the content based on the conditions in your terms.

Marketing requirements

Most platforms like Facebook, Google, or Twitter, require you to have terms and conditions on your site that address their requirements.

Complying with regulations

In some countries, there are regulations that apply with internet use that you have to address in your terms before your website can have visitors from that country. For example the Internet Regulation in Australia has a core objectives of the scheme to "address community concerns about offensive and illegal material on the Internet and, in particular, to protect children from exposure to material that is unsuitable for them.

This means your teams may required advice about adult content or age restrictions for accessing the site. Conversely, your terms may indicate no adult content is permitted.

Set the governing law

This means setting the basis for the laws that apply to the website. The governing law would look like this.

These terms and conditions are governed by the laws of XYZ country.

Getting your terms and conditions wrong and how to fix it

If your terms and conditions are wrong then there is a high probability that one of the previous five point is going to occur leaving you with a potential problem that could be expensive. What I see a lot of people doing is copying other websites terms and conditions, and hoping they are good enough to keep them out of hot water.

It's a recipe for disaster if you have copied someone else terms and conditions, if this is you then you need to fix it as soon as possible. So what are your options for creating a good set of terms and conditions.

There is basically three options:

1. Accept the risk of the copy and pasted terms and conditions - not recommended
2. Hire a lawyer to write your terms and conditions
3. Use the online automated template solution

When I realized the mistake I had made on my websites, I looked into these three options, and option 1 was immediately deleted. Option 2 was investigated, but not many lawyers were interested in this task, and the ones that did provide a quote back wanted thousands of dollars.

So what I did was looked at a few of the template options because I wanted my terms and conditions as soon as possible so I settled Law Depot which turned out really well because I received quality terms and conditions, wills, and tenant agreements. My plan now is each year I will generate new website terms and conditions and privacy policies every 12 months.