Privacy policy and other legal pages, how important are they?
I know no one reads the entire privacy policy and terms and conditions of a SaaS product before signing up. But mostly kept for legal reasons?
Curious how important these pages are for a product in the early stage?
Any suggestion on getting one?
It's always a good idea to have some straightforward privacy policy or terms and conditions before you start having external users try out your product.
While you could put one together yourself, I found it easier and less time consuming to use a service. The one I tried recently was Termsfeed and was pretty happy with the experience
Not sure about non-European countries, but for Europe this is not a nice to have, but a legal requirement. Terms of use, terms of service, legal notice, privacy policy and cookie policy.
These are basically the first pages I draft before even working on the homepage copy and before removing my .htpasswd protection on any domain.
It would be interesting to hear @petartod's thoughts on this topic. :)
From a legal perspective, you need a privacy policy from day 1, and it is highly recommendable to have Terms of Use from day 1 as well.
A privacy policy is required everywhere except in 48 US states (California and Nevada are the exceptions), India (for now), and underdeveloped countries with no data protection laws in place. You need one if you have users from Europe, Brazil, the rest of South America, Australia, the UK, Canada, South Africa, and many others.
Honestly, data protection agencies, for now, exist mostly for the big players, so if you don't have any or if you have a non-compliant one it is unlikely that they'll come after you. However, you may experience problems if a user submits you a data subject request asking what you do with their data, do you document consents, etc. They could take you to the data protection authorities and get you fined.
Terms of Use, in general, are not obligatory unless you need some kind of a purchase agreement with users (and payment is involved). They are the written contract between you and your users. If you have one that fits your business, it shields you from users who could go after you if they are not happy with the service. It largely depends on what your business is.
In the beginning, when you are testing out the waters, it may be fine not to have one. But, once your business shows signs of success, it would be unserious to run the business without ToU.
To sum it up:
Thank you so much. It is really useful
Petar, thank you so much for this reply! I also noticed that you made this the topic of your most recent newsletter issue.
This was super helpful!
CC-ing @bpixel and @dakl as they probably didn't get a notification for your comment.
Thank you very much. There is just so much I don't know.
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Yes, have any of your users ever asked for it, or you just decided its time to get one?
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Thanks