Dave Naffziger's Blog

A recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made it clear that companies must inform customers when they update their Terms of Service. Computerworld has a good summary of the case.

I’ve always doubted the legality of the clauses that allow a company to change their Terms of Service without notifying their users (like Google’s for example). These clauses have definitely been used to introduce consumer-unfriendly changes to contracts. While this is very easy to implement for customers with logins, it can create problems for websites that do not require customers to login.

Now is probably a good time to review your company’s TOS to see if you need to update your users on any changes that you may have made since they were initially crafted. As usual, Eric Goldman has a stellar writeup of the ruling and implmentation options for websites.