Privacy Policies and Terms of Use

These are documents most often copied from somewhere else and may expose a company to huge liability.

A privacy policy must reflect the company’s business practices, products, data collection, and users. Those facts determine which U.S. and international laws apply. A borrowed policy creates liability when its promises don’t match the company’s practices.

Terms of use should reflect the company’s values, user expectations, and product features while protecting its IP, proprietary information, and trade secrets. Even customized terms may be unenforceable without proper notice and affirmative user acceptance.

What Goes Into a Privacy Policy

A privacy policy has to describe your real data practices. What personal information you collect, how you collect it, why, who you share it with, how long you keep it, how users exercise their rights, and how you handle data across jurisdictions.

Requirements vary by law and by jurisdiction, and several state laws now specify particular disclosures. App stores, ad networks, analytics providers, and payment processors add their own requirements on top.

What Goes Into Terms of Use

Terms of use are a contract. They cover who may use the service and on what conditions, acceptable use, intellectual property ownership on both sides, user-generated content, payment and subscription mechanics, disclaimers and limitation of liability, dispute resolution, and termination.

Enforceability turns on presentation and assent. Terms requiring a clear affirmative action to accept hold up considerably better than terms linked from a page footer. Courts examine what a reasonable user would have understood they were agreeing to.

These Documents Are Not Set and Forget

A privacy policy describes a product. When the product changes, the policy is wrong. New analytics, a new vendor, a new feature collecting different data, an AI tool added to the stack, all of it changes what the policy should say.

The same applies to terms of use when you add a subscription tier, open a new market, or change how content is handled.

HMLG reviews both on a defined cycle for ongoing clients, so they keep describing the business you actually operate.