Avoidable Privacy Snafus: Multiple Sets of Terms for the Same Service
2 min read
If you are building and selling an EdTech product, you can benefit from having people on the sales and marketing teams go through the user-facing interface of your product. As part of this process, you should also have members of these teams read through your terms of service and privacy policies.
This came up in a conversation today about the terms of service and privacy policies of a service called "PaperRater." I have a screengrab of the discussion.
I observed that one of the odd things about the service was that it appeared to have two separate policies: one for the free service, and a second set of terms for the premium service.
The terms for the free service are linked from the main PaperRater site: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
The different terms for the premium service are linked from the premium service signup page, and are available here: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
This screencast breaks down how this issue is presented to end users.
An easy and obvious fix for this would be to have the links from the premium signup page point back to the privacy policies and terms from the main PaperRater site. At that point, there could be a discussion about how to improve the actual terms with clarity around what terms applied to the free and fee-based service.
Of course, it's also possible that different terms should apply to fee-based and free services. But, if that is the case, then the differences should be made clearly and transparently to end users.
