Creating a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for your Tahoe Site
Having a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service for your Tahoe site isn't just recommended, it is absolutely mandatory for the legal running of your website. Because this is a delicate legal matter, before we even start talking about how to get this done, we'll need to add a quick disclaimer here:
Disclaimer: This article is not legal advice, nor has it been written or vetted by legal professionals. Appsembler is not responsible for the legal compliance of your site before or after following or not following any of the steps recommended in this guide. In the event of any issues with your terms of service or privacy policy, please consult with a legal professional, as Appsembler Support will be unable to offer professional advice on this subject. If direct questions are asked about how Appsembler processes data and delivers our services to you, we will answer as legally appropriate to the best of our ability, but we will not be checking to ensure the accuracy or compliance of any policies present on our sites.
With that sadly required nastiness out of the way, let's get into it.
Basic Requirements for your Privacy Policy
- Mention that Appsembler exists as both a data controller and a data processor on your behalf (as we host your site and need to access the data of your users to fix things when you request support)
- Mention any third-party services you communicate data to, such as Segment, Google Analytics
- Ensure your Privacy Policy is GDPR-compliant
Basic Requirements for your Terms of Service
- Protect your company's liability against potential lawsuits
- Mention that you can revoke their access at any time for any reason
- Ensure that your copyright ownership is clear
- Make sure that you are not responsible for learners misusing your site or tools in any way
Option 1 - Talk to legal professionals
By far the most expensive but safest option for all this is to contract a lawyer to draw up these terms and policies for you. Legal professionals do this sort of thing all the time, and will be able to ask you questions about how your site uses data to ensure that the resulting policies are legally compliant. If you are fortunate enough to have an in-house legal team at your company, now is absolutely the time to use them.
You can use this option in combination with the others if you want to save money, i.e. draw up your policies using a template and then have a lawyer check them to make sure you've done it correctly. This is generally cheaper, but is not always an available service.
Option 2 - Use a generator
Privacy and terms generators exist, and they tend to cost money, but not as much as a lawyer. Customers have previously used services such as Iubenda, Termly and TermsFeed to create their policies, and other competitors exist to offer a similar service. The downside of using a generator is it requires you to correctly input the required information in order for your policy to turn out correct and legally compliant.
Option 3 - Use a template
Templates exist of these where you basically just fill in the company name and a few other details into the blank spaces. Many of these are free, but leave you with the biggest potential liability, as they are not tailored specifically to your Tahoe site or your users. TermsFeed offer these templates, as do a few others, and you can find a lot by simply searching "Privacy Policy Template" or similar.
While we cannot and should not make any express recommendations here, to avoid making our lawyers angry at us, we hope that helps with getting this messy legal requirement out of the way when setting up your site! It protects your company, your learners, and yourself from so many future issues that it's absolutely something we recommend doing as early as possible.