It’s a universally acknowledged truth that most people don’t take so much as a glance at any given company’s terms of use. As MailChimp’s general counsel, this bothers me—the terms of use make up our entire contract with our users, so it’s really important stuff. But as a human, I understand why people might not have read our terms until now. They weren’t very welcoming, to say the least:

So after pondering this problem for a long time, doing a bunch of research, and collaborating with a team of coworkers, including our amazing content strategist, UX designer, and front-end developer, I’m happy to present our solution. Today, we’re unveiling our redesigned legal policies, which include our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, API Use Policy, and Copyright Policy. The main goal of changing these policies was to make them easier for you to understand, in hopes that you might actually read them. To accomplish this, we did a few things:

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Today is Data Privacy Day. I don’t think anyone gets work off for the holiday, but as MailChimp’s general counsel and privacy officer, it’s still pretty exciting to me. Since Data Privacy Day’s main purpose is to educate people about—you guessed it—data privacy, I thought I’d share a little bit about how MailChimp’s privacy policy works.

MailChimp is serious about security, and we keep track of every way data can be moved or exposed. Our privacy policy lays out the narrow ways we collect, use, and disclose user data. User data is most commonly used or disclosed in the course of doing things you told us to do, like asking for customer support, turning on SocialPro, or using other features that involve third-party providers. Any time we consider adding a feature that may use or disclose user data, we look at any possible way we can limit the disclosure. If a service provider is involved, then we make sure our contracts with that third party clearly spell out our data-protection requirements.

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