End User Agreement - what should be stored?

Question

Hi,

We have an end user agreement for one of our sites. When the end user reads agreement, he'll have an option to accept that agreement by ticking a checkbox and submitting a form.

My question is what data should I store in database and should I store any data at all? The concern that I have, is that user may say that he never ticked that box and never accepted the agreement.

Initially I was going to store the following data:

1. User Contact Details (Name, address, etc).
2. Date time when he has accepted the agreement
3. Copy of the agreement.

Then I was going to encrypt all that data and store in in a database.

What other precautions should I take?

Answer 1

This is a legal question rather than a technical one : the best person to ask would be a lawyer.

From a technical standpoint, if your application is account-based, you can store in each account whether the owner of that account accepted the end user agreement, and prevent them from doing any critical activity (such as logging in) if they have not accepted yet.

Even if there are no accounts, you can use the session to prevent the user from doing critical activities if they have not accepted the end user agreement within the same session.