What concerns should I have with Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy in a side project?

Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documents are mostly boilerplate for side projects.

My personal take on the creation of these documents for new side projects involves finding closest competitors that operate in the same markets and simply modify their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documents to reflect my new side business.

Once my hypothesis regarding the business model for a new side project is proven successful I would hire a law office I work with to draft unique legal documents that reflect more closely how the business works and relationships with clients.

One thing to be aware of is GDPR and upcoming ePrivacy regulation about user privacy applicable to EU countries. However, even if your business is incorporated outside of EU, if you have any users that are from EU countries these regulations can impact your business severely, as fines can be in millions of euros.

This is another reason why it is important to hire a professional to draft these documents as soon as the side hustle becomes profitable.

Cheers!

Think of a Terms and Conditions / Terms of Service page or Privacy Policy page as something making other people aware of things within your company: your legal obligations to someone, someone's legal obligations to you, the service you provide, the data you serve, and any other information regarding your product.

Now imagine you have your worst client who is threatening to sue you for everything you've got. They are going after your LLC because you cost their company thousands of dollars in lost data.

Does your Terms of Service / Terms of Conditions or Privacy Page protect you or even talk about data? If a lawyer sent you a notice that you were being sued. Would you be comfortable fighting it using your Terms of Service page as your primary legal defense? Because it's that page -- that matters most to the law.

And if you have no Terms or you may have missed the most important details of terms and your product, than you're wrong in the eyes of the law, to an extent. Though many Terms pages can simply state: "Despite some losses -- we'll try to help, but if we can't, you can't sue us." So lets say you are responsible for data loss: you would want a terms page stating what occurs and what you are responsible for as a company providing a service to a client.

Consider this a COMPANY CONTRACT FOR USERS WHO AGREE TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS IN ORDER TO USE YOUR PRODUCT.

I've just started with a random generator. Sharing an affiliate link for those interested because they are an awesome host -- but I really like what Vultr did with their Terms of Service page: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7255112

I believe Automattic the company behind Wordpress open sources their TOS and Privacy Policy.

IANAL, but privacy policies are fairly boilerplate. TOS is mostly boilerplate with some material specifics to your product and industry.

You can also look at Docracy for open source legal docs.

I'm just starting out and have been wondering this , too.