Service providers should have their legal agreements posted on their websites, it’s a matter of law and trust – at least, in the case of privacy policies.

But with the ever changing legal regulations and increasing need of transparency, not to mention that even users may help you improve your terms of use agreement by telling what’s missing, you will have to make changes, smaller or bigger – from time to time.

It’s important and recommended that before you post your terms of service on your website, making it this way publicly available, you settle a method on letting your users know about changes, whether minor or important, in your legal agreements.

How will you do that?

Well, a significant percent of companies and organizations choose to specify in their ToS agreements that changes will be done without any notice for the users; so it’s the users’ responsibility to verify it from time to time to make sure they agree or not.

However, other companies make themselves responsible with this kind of actions. So they make blog posts about major changes, they send e-mail to their users or they just simply modify the color of the link that users follow to have access to terms of use text.

Sounds quite simple and it seems to be more effective for users to become aware of changes. The other method works just fine too but users may forget to verify if there are any changes, once they’ve read the terms of use when they started using your services.

You can convert from “it’s your responsibility if I change the terms of use” to “it’s my responsibility to inform you of any changes I make of my terms of services to make things easier”.

It’s never too late to change your mind if you started by letting users to check if there are any modifications, it all depends on what you’re aiming at.