Join me on my journey to bring Steem/it to the masses.
This last week has been a busy one. The final deadline for completion is approaching and at this stage in any project there is always a lot of things to finalise.
The Legal Stuff
You know its getting close to being real when we are talking about the Legal Stuff. There are at least two important documents that an app owner needs to consider before release and the earlier the better.
The difficulty here is there is not much legal or regulatory precedent especially relating to Blockchain based Applications. If your app posts data to a blockchain, how can you delete it?
Privacy Policy
In order to launch a mobile app on the play store you need to supply at a minimum a privacy policy (For apps that request access to sensitive permissions or data ).
Don't leave this to the last minute as there are some onerous requirements here. It may even affect the design of your app, I would recommend working through your privacy policy at an early stage of the app development.
Privacy...
Privacy has become an even more important for people in the EU or people that transact in the EU due to the upcoming GDPR legislation. While reviewing my privacy policy I realised that this actually applies to a lot of the apps that people on Steemit use. For example if you have a website that users browse to you probably collect traffic stats for the website. This is personal information and would require a disclosure as part of a user agreement. I have a few sites I need to work through before the end of May!
Terms of Service
The second important part of disclosure is the Terms of Service. This is not a requirement for submission to the play store but I would recommend it in order to protect your rights and responsibilities.
When a user downloads an application that you own it is good practice to offer them a Terms of Service/Use Agreement. These generally cover ownership, use, liability and continuation of services.
Steem Apps
I reviewed some of the more popular apps that I have come across that link to Steem and I was surprised at how light many of them were on Terms of Service and Privacy Statements. If you're the owner an app, this is something you really need to get out ahead of and I would urge you to review these documents to ensure your complying with relevant legislation. I found the following link quite useful for some background reading:
If anyone has any recommendations for legal firms that specialise in this type of thing, specifically relating to Blockchain technology please leave a link in the comments.
Edit:
Another thought occurred to me. Wouldn't it be great if we could store documents like described in this on the Steem blockchain?
We would get Increased transparency and accountability. The issue with doing this at the moment is that comments could really ruin the page. You kind of need to keep this stuff under your control to maintain the experience of your site. If we could post but turn the comments off then the Steem blockchain could become a great place to store public documents such as this. Any thoughts?
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.
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