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Legal Advice: What is the best inexpensive way to create a privacy policy and terms and conditions for a website that has a social networking component to it?
GK
GK
Gregg Kennelly, Building Operations Enthusiast #CRE answered:

I have read the Terms & Conditions for Google Chrome, The NYSE, ebay & Dwolla.
My Advice: Take the Terms & Conditions seriously!!
Please do NOT listen to irresponsible advice calling for you to simply "replace" your name with your competitors name. That is completely irresponsible.

While you should absolutely read every word of your competitor's Terms & Conditions, do that to glean interesting details about their business models. I promise you will have a better understanding of how your competitors operate by reading their Terms & Conditions and that's hugely valuable.

Print the Terms & Conditions of your competitors (3-5 companies is enough) and carry them around with you. Read each of them carefully, mark them up with a red pen and you'll notice that they do have some identical paragraphs, which are the standard ones that are in fact probably safe to re-use. Since I happen to be putting the finishing touches on my own Terms and Conditions right now, I pasted a portion of the opening paragraph below.

"Although we would love to have a one page membership agreement with a few bullet points, our increasingly litigious society makes that impossible. To make this more interesting, we highlighted some key points below and tried to avoid the legal ease at every turn. But website Terms & Conditions are contracts, so please read the entire membership agreement.
Here goes.."

All the best,

Gregg

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