Justin Sha

No. It would be ill advised to copy legal boilerplate or another company’s Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Terms of Use, or other policy given that each company’s product and services offerings are unique to their specific blend of features offered to consumers. But that does not mean you should ignore what other companies are doing. Quite the contrary. As an illustrative example to keep the discussion practical, specific, and less vague, let’s use Privacy Policies as an example (specifically, those used by dating and social app companies).

Although another company’s Privacy Policy cannot serve as a template, it can serve as a checklist. When drafting a Privacy Policy, it can be extremely useful to find and review comparator policies as an issue spotting strategy. Compare your own Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or other public-facing policies against those of market or industry leaders and those of your closest competitors, as it may prompt questions that you did not previously consider. 

The questions will all be valuable. (Questions like… Does our product use advertising technology? Does it collect sensitive information? What do our SDKs collect? Do we use artificial intelligence? What happens after account deletion? Do we make inferences from user activity? What about international data transfer – do we have the required disclosures, safeguards, or transfer mechanisms?) But it would be a mistake to assume that all of their answers or even the identified issues are all relevant to your company’s particular business offering. 

Hinge and Grindr illustrate the point particularly well. Both are dating and social applications, but their products do not work the same way.

• Hinge’s Privacy Policy: Hinge is organized around recommending potential matches and mutual connections. Information about a user’s profile, preferences, and interactions supports that matching experience. Hinge also uses AI to suggest prompt feedback and convo starters to users.
• Grindr’s Privacy Policy: Grindr has a different product architecture. Its Privacy Policy describes public profiles and a proximity based experience in which location information can be used to determine distance between users and sort profiles according to relative distance. Grindr has its own AI driven features, third party cookies to force (annoying) advertisements onto free users, and other features that require specific privacy disclosures.

Ultimately, the underlying categories of data collected, processed, maintained, and shared by Hinge and Grindr may overlap, but what really matters is what all of that information does inside the product and, correspondingly, how the relevant data practices translate into the necessary privacy law disclosures, as required by applicable law. Both Hinge and Grindr collect location information, but they use them differently and for different features; Hinge matches users, while Grindr shows a community grid. They both collect user activity and use it to personalize the experience, but in different ways. With respect to AI-driven features, Hinge uses generative AI to provide Prompt Feedback and Convo Starters based on profile information, while Grindr increasingly uses it across discovery, search, recommendations, messaging, and profile insights. They might even use the same third party service (e.g., Amazon Web Services) but configure the service differently. 

In sum, a comparator’s Privacy Policy might tell you or give hints at what questions to ask, but they cannot be copied verbatim given the underlying differences between your company’s product and theirs.