As regulations and best practices regarding online terms continues to impose increasing requirements on operators of websites, apps and online services, a basic set of online terms can now encompass as many as half a dozen documents! One just needs to glance at the footer of most any website to see the array of policies that are now needed to minimally address commercial and legal considerations. A normal schema of online terms includes: Terms of Service, an Acceptable Use Policy, a Copyright/DMCA Policy, a Privacy Policy, a Cookie Policy, and a California Privacy Notice. All of these various policies typically wrap up into the Terms of Service. From a practical standpoint, and in some instances out of legal necessity, it is best to break these policies into separate documents and utilize hyperlinks and other embedded text to create a structure that can be navigated electronically. To date, this has seemed to be a reasonable approach and is particularly favored by web and app designers who strive to create clean screens with streamlined text.
But beware—nesting hyperlinks to various policies within a master set of terms can lead to trouble.