By default, Speakap doesn't offer legal documents like a Privacy Statement or Terms and Conditions for its individual networks. This is because a generic version of these documents could never cover all of the potential (local) laws that apply to your specific situation.
To make sure that you follow all these (local) laws that apply to you, we offer you the option to set and publish your own legal documents from the Legal settings section of the Network settings. You can read all about how this works in this article.
Legal settings
The Legal settings within the Network settings allow you to set up to three different legal documents within your network. An overview of these documents, and what their behaviour is can be found in the overview below.
The Terms and Conditions, also sometimes referred to as Terms of Use or Terms of Service is a legally binding document that describes (amongst others) the user's rights and responsibilities, proper usage of the platform and accountability for their actions on the platform.
This document must be accessible during the activation of the account and the user should explicitly accept this during the registration process. Changes to this document should also be reviewed and accepted by existing users.
For more information about the Terms and Conditions, please refer to this Wikipedia page.
Privacy Statement, also sometimes referred to as Privacy Policy, is a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client's data.
This document must be accessible during the activation of the account and the user should explicitly accept this during the registration process. Notifying them about changes is optional and should not require the user to accept these changes.
For more information about the Privacy Statement, please refer to this Wikipedia page.
In certain markets like Germany, websites and applications are obliged to have an Imprint or Impressum that is accessible to all its users. This document contains information about the company and its legal entity. While it's accessible from the Legal section in the Speakap interface, there is no way to prompt the user to review or accept this document.
For more information about the Impressum, please refer to this Wikipedia page.
Which document to use for which purpose is ultimately up to you, but we would suggest using each individual document for the following cases
- You should use the Terms and Conditions when:
- Users need to accept the contents of the document...
- ...during the activation of their account
- ...upon changes to the content of the document
- You need to disclose this information to active users
- Users need to accept the contents of the document...
- You should use the Privacy Statement when:
- You need to inform users on the rules that apply to the network...
- ...during the activation of their account
- ...upon changing them
- You need to disclose this information to active users
- You need to inform users on the rules that apply to the network...
- You should use the Legal Notice when:
- You need to disclose this information to active users
Or use the following table to help you in deciding which document fits your needs best.
Creating your content
Once you know which document to use for your purpose, you can start adding content to it using our Rich Text Editor. This is a limited version of the same Richt Text Editor you use when composing a news item and it allows you to add the following elements to your document:
- Preset text styles such as headers and normal text
- Bold, italic and underlined texts
- Ordered and unordered lists
- Hyperlinks
Naming your document
Optionally you can give your document a custom name, which will be used in any scenario where we present the document to the end user. If you do not add a custom name, we will show the default names for each individual document to the end user.
Note: For admin screens, we never show the custom name but always the default names.
Extra options
For both the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement, it’s possible to enable an extra option, that will prompt existing users on your platform about the (changes to the) document. Depending on which document you chose, the end user either needs to review and accept the (changes to the) document, or simply review the document.
Saving and enabling
Once you’re done editing your document, you can decide to save your document and enable it for the entire network. If you only save it, the document is not shown to your end users upon registration and is not prompted for existing users. Only when you enable the document, this will occur.
Disabling individual documents
If, for whatever reason, you need to disable one of the documents within your network, you can go to the Settings tab in the Legal section. Here you can individually enable and disable the documents.
Note: When a document is disabled, the end users might have registered themselves without reviewing and activating your Terms and Conditions. This might have legal consequences for which Speakap cannot be held accountable.