You finally get your own website up and running one fine day, and have your very own entrepreneurial venture under your complete control. Well, since you might be a hardcore coder, a HTML CSS Genius, or a developer in general, you are hardly aware of the legal aspects that come into picture as soon as your website goes ‘live’. That is exactly where the Terms of Service (ToS)/ Privacy Policy (PP) come into play. Every website that you might have visited would have had a ToS/PP link at the bottom of their website.
Image Credits: icanhascheezburger.com
What are Terms of Service and Privacy Policy?
Terms of service are nothing but rules and regulations by which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service/website. Privacy Policy is a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a website gathers, uses, discloses and manages a customer’s data.To know what a ToS page looks like, check out the ToS of WordPress .
As you can see, its a huge document with tons of clauses and paragraphs, which reminded me of the a country’s Constitution!
So what do you do if you have just started out as an entrepreneur of your website and want a ToS of your own?
I bumped onto links on Google which gave me what I really wanted. A Terms of Service Generator!
There were quite a few Generators available. Out of the lot, following are the ones which I found easy and efficient.
bennadel.com
This tool designed by blogger/developer Ben Nadel is simple and efficient, giving you a pretty generic ToS which you might have to revise later. All you have to do is enter your company name and the state where you belong, and simply click on “Generate Terms of Service agreement”.
legalriver.com
This service asks detailed questions regarding the policies of the website, services which it provides,Details about the designated agent, warranty details etc. and delivers a complete Terms of Service. Also, I found the website (legalriver.com) a ‘must visit’ for new entrepreneurs that face difficulty in understanding legal aspects. Do check it out.
Update: This service has been discontinued. Thanks to Landon’s update in comments.
webmasters-cavern.com
Again a generic ToS which might need more editing later on. It also provides the Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy along with the ToS. The generated Terms of Service can be retrieved in 2 forms: Sending the ToS at the email address provided, or in the form of an HTML script.
codeachrome.com
This generator provides both ToS and PP, although one might still need to go through it to make sure everything is relevant for one’s specific product/service. The guys at codeachrome have used ready Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of Automattic Inc- A company dealing with wordpress projects. Details such as Premium services provided other than the normal services can be entered to get detailed Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Do drop in your comments and feedback below. 🙂
7 Comments
thnks for sharing this info 🙂
really nice tools
thanks mate for sharing this stuff.keep it up
thanks for sharing!!!
Thank you 🙂
Thanks for sharing this interesting selection of TOS generators! I had been looking around the ‘net for a while…
Just wanted to let you know that LegalRiver’s TOS generator is no longer in service. It was my favorite one!
Thanks for letting us know in the comments sections, I have updated the post too.