Terms of service or terms and conditions

In one line. Terms of service, terms of use and terms and conditions are three names for the same published document, and which one a site uses tends to follow the market it was written in rather than anything about its contents.

The question comes up the first time somebody has to put a link in a footer. There are three phrases in circulation, every competitor seems to use a different one, and it feels as though picking wrong might matter.

It does not, in the way people fear. What matters is what the document says and whether anyone agreed to it.

Two regions, two habits of naming

Terms and conditions is the older phrase and the standard one in British, Irish and much of Commonwealth commercial use. It arrived from selling things — the conditions attached to a sale — and it followed businesses onto the web.

Terms of service is the standard phrase in American software, and it spread with the products that used it. It reads as a document about an ongoing relationship rather than a transaction, which suits a subscription.

Terms of use sits between them and is common for websites and apps where there is no purchase — the rules for using the thing, rather than the terms of buying anything.

There is no legal category behind any of the three. A document titled terms and conditions on an American product and a document titled terms of service on a British one are doing the same job, and neither title changes how the words are read.

What are examples of terms and conditions?

The recurring ones are the rules of use, accounts, payment, ownership, liability, termination and governing law. Whatever it is called, a set of published terms of use tends to hold the same things.

Who is publishing it. The company behind the site or product, named properly, with a way to reach it.

What the service is. What is provided, and what is not.

The rules of use. What a user may and may not do — the acceptable use section, which is usually the longest.

Accounts. How one is made, who may make one, what happens when one is closed.

Money. If anything is paid for: prices, billing, renewal, refunds and cancellation.

Content and ownership. Who owns what the company made, who owns what the user uploads, and what licence each grants the other.

Availability and limits. What is promised about the service working, what is not, and how liability is limited.

Ending it. Suspension, termination, and what happens to data afterwards.

Changes. How the terms are updated and how users are told.

Governing law. One line naming which body of law reads all of the above — the clause covered in what governing law actually decides.

Where the privacy policy sits

Beside the terms, never inside them, and this is the one naming distinction that is real.

Terms are the agreement between the publisher and the user about using the service. A privacy policy is a notice about personal data: what is collected, why, what is done with it, who else sees it, how long it is kept and what rights people have over it. In many places that notice is required to exist in its own right, and it is written to be read rather than agreed to.

Selling goods adds a third document. Terms of sale cover the transaction — price, delivery, returns, risk — and a shop commonly publishes site terms and sale terms as separate pages because they govern different acts by different people.

Consumer-facing publishing carries local rules on top of all of this, about what has to be disclosed and what cannot be excluded. What applies to you is a question for local law and a lawyer, not for a page like this.

One page, two titles

For anyone still stuck at the footer: pick the phrase your market reads without hesitating, use it consistently across the site, and put the effort into the contents instead.

Two practical notes about the contents rather than the title. First, published terms only do their work if there is a record of acceptance — a checkbox, a sign-up step, a version and a date — because a document nobody agreed to is a statement of hope. Second, terms get updated, and the update mechanism in the document is what makes the new version applicable; that is a version and a signature problem in a different costume, and accepting is not signing is about the same distinction.

At the door. contracts.io makes paper, not legal advice. Describe your product in one sentence and read back terms of use, a privacy policy or terms of sale in plain language, with the governing law named from the full list — England and Wales, Ireland, California and the rest. Everything the site can describe is in the templates catalogue.