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andI have had a lot of fun with building community sites and learning some essential PHP, all sorts of open source software, migrating data, SQL, and a few other database types, like CRM’s and whatnot. There are differences between servers, sometimes a static type service is fine, and sometimes you want a media server. When I was understanding this stuff, real-time communication through a web interface could require any number of server types, one of them was RTMFP. Maybe it still does, I don’t know. I know that was a big deal when I graduated to making those decisions. None of these things became any kind of income producers, but they were fun and it’s all a very interesting process and world.
Deconstructing your Terms of Service and Privacy Policies
I will make you WANT to read the Terms of Service and Privacy on Websites.
In this time of media reconfiguration, and the fact that Americans seem to be moving toward maintaining their First Amendment Rights in the face of the absurd onslaught of puerile behavior from internet distribution systems, here is a solution to some things that will help people actually WANT to read the TOS, Privacy, and other legal statements regarding the websites they use. We can’t expect the outlets to be honest, but we can use honesty to out maneuver them.
It falls in line with the ideas from past episodes about knowing what we don’t want. It’s more deconstructing and removing verbiage that is unnecessary for conceptual thought. Knowing what we don’t want is usually more important than knowing what we do want. Omitting the unnecessary and unclear is a recipe for a clear and confident mindset.
How often have you actually read the Terms of Service (TOS), or Privacy policies on websites, services and social media that you use? It’s so boring and tedious, right? What if there is a way to make it simple to decode and likely for you to check them out? What if it was interesting enough to make you WANT to check them out.
I had a dream once, a vision, I wanted to do something, so, I tried. I was (am) entrepreneurial and I made a couple of huge mistakes in 2009, embarrassing mistakes building a social media site. It was a lot of really hard, and wasted work. But, I learned. It didn’t even have anything to do with the topic of this blog post, and maybe I’ll write about that some day. If you want to know about the big mistakes I made, and don’t want to repeat those mistakes so you have a better chance at being successful, well, that would cost you. That was an expensive lesson and I still need to recoup from that. Unless you want to pay me to tell you that stuff, then you can suffer like I did. It’s one of those “Damn, if I knew then what I know now” things. I’ll tell you, but it will cost you.
In the process of that monumental “failure” I learned some very valuable things, and one of the things was how I came up with presenting TOS and Privacy policies, and that’s what I’m going to explain here.
I have this problem where I really like to dive in and understand things. It came down to the point where I had to come up with the TOS and privacy for this kind of niche social media type site I made. I had to really think through it and have it come out as simple as I could make it. I didn’t want it to be long and complicated, and I wanted to make sure people knew what they were getting into.
The way I went about doing that was to begin making a list of what the site does do, and what it does not do. Then what happened is I realized that what I was creating was a Site Description, Terms of Service, and a Privacy Policy Statement all at the same time. It was an interesting thing that happened by accident as I was describing the site to myself in preparation to describing it to others.
I call this The All in One Document © I am your new television OK? You can stop thinking, 2019, 2024. Bear in mind that the example I’m showing you is a small sample of what would actually be needed to truly fill out a proper site description. I really only want to spend enough time to make the points I learned from the process and to convey it.
I think you’ll see that it’s the kind of thing that can be adjusted for whatever type of site someone is making, and eventually, if put into wide practice could result in categories that are easily understood, and will even be interesting for the site users to read the TOS and Privacy Policies. Can you imagine these policies being interesting? I first came up with this in 2009, I revisited it in 2019, and now I’m presenting it to you here.
Some of you are going to want to argue about what the policies are, and miss the point of the post. You are welcome to argue about the policies of a fictional website. At least using this kind of approach, you can actually tell what the policies are before you chime in about your opinions about what someone else is supposed to do with their service. Now you can actually have that discussion and enjoy the process, and consider your rights and responsibilities. You’re welcome.
In the left column, it says what the site does, and in the right it simply states what it does not engage in.
See what I did there? As you go through it, you realize that you’re getting a Site Description, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policies all at the same time. I’m showing you a simplified version, but for some sites that would be enough. It does not have to be super complicated.
Other things that would happen are links within each of the table fields where there is expounding on the issue addressed. Eventually, simple, unified icons can begin to represent concepts, similar to content attribution icons. Icons are the Universal Language of the Internet (ULI). You will be able to go through it and just see the iconography. Then what will happen next is that sites will fall into certain categories, or, their AOD category. As there are ratings for movies, and age restrictions for events, there will be a categorization of sites and it will be something you learn easily.
One of the lessons learned from this is from the cliche of “there is no such thing as failure” because even though I didn’t achieve my stated goals in that site endeavor, I still learned some valuable lessons that should be worth something to someone, and I stumbled into ideas that will be useful in future attempts. This thing I just showed you is just what I’m showing you. What I’m not showing you is like a chocolate fountain, only maybe molten gold.
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What if "Terms of Service" was FUN!