Steem App - Dev Week 10
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.
Stock image: pixabay.com
Seem like you are putting in the hard work now to get all the little details finalized. While there are probably legal firms that could help, you are still breaking a lot of new ground on the project so it might not be a perfect fit compared to existing apps and sites.
Beginning a project is easy when you are full of dreams and ideas but it's the end when you start coming down to the little problems that it's not so fun anymore.
Hope you get it all wrapped up and ready to go soon. We'll be waiting.
I completely agree. Thanks for the encouragement.
random place to post this I know! but this is my Irish friend https://steemit.com/@wallpaperflower
she hasn't posted in a while but do you have a place where u chat about the meet ups?your welcome to use the discoerd I set up if not or I can pass her your email?
https://discord.gg/qDHTeWH
got your msg on chat. wow! really happy for you and look forward to what you've prepared for us! ^^
Thanks for your engagement.Im also trying to help steemit develop by staying active and promoting good quality content.Sadly Im just a "minnow" or however you like to call it🤗Steemit has bright future ahead of it if it will keep developing.
What are you working on @foremostwiseguy. I am always interested to hear about new projects.
That's still very early stage of the idea so I can't talk about any details.Right now Im on stage of getting funds and finding right people.The whole thing will be based on promoting unique,interesting content.Im not really enthusiastic about new users being forced to use bots for promotion.I understand this is necessary at the moment but I think this wont be healthy for the platform in long term.There is very small percentage of whales trying to help out new good content creators.Im not content creator at the moment and I don't know if I will ever be but I see potential and possibilities of Steemit and that's why I want to help this platform as good as I will be able to.I will gladly inform you about the details when everything will be precisely planned and pre set.Keep up your good work.Your post are always really informative🤓
You have a minor grammatical mistake in the following sentence:
It should be you're the instead of your the.I will upvote and resteem your last blog post free to my 35,000+ followers if you reply with the word, "free".