Frequently Asked Questions

[clementbiron]

Type name

Frequently Asked Questions

Alternative type names

FAQ
Q&A (Questions and Answers)
Common Questions
Troubleshooting Guide
Help Center

Writer

service provider

Audience

end user

Object

frequently asked questions about the service, its policies

Examples

Example	Service Name	URL	Title	Jurisdiction
1	Amazon Firefly	URL 🔗	FAQ	-
2	Who.is	URL 🔗	Frequently Asked Questions	-
3	Telegram	URL 🔗	FAQ	-
4	SteamDB	URL 🔗	Frequently Asked Questions	-
5	Scholarships	URL 🔗	Frequently Asked Questions	-

References

No response

Comments

In my view, FAQs are generally not contractual documents and sometimes this is even clearly writes (e.g. https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/faq/19115). But they can have a certain contractual value if they explicitly refer to contractual conditions and are incorporated by reference into a contract. In the event of a dispute, they can be used as proof of intent or mutual understanding (e.g. Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du 3 février 2023).

[MattiSG]

• 1: yes (“Does Backup and Restore backup my Firefly history?”, “What happens to my Firefly images and audio?”, “Can I delete my Firefly images and audio that are retained in the Cloud?”). However, this is in my opinion a specific case that should be handled with a multi-document terms starting from the ToS that link to that page.
• 2: no, this is an explainer with commercial language
• 4: this “FAQ” is a big melting pot of all sorts of policies and manual; it is presented as FAQ but the legal parts in that one document could be extracted as different terms with different types
• 5: this is a manual / explainer page

Telegram (example 3) is the trickiest one. Indeed, it has minimalistic terms that then link to a proper privacy policy, a proper DSA enforcement document, and the FAQ for clarifications. These minimalistic terms are the ones tracked by PGA, for example.
I believe these terms could be expanded in a multi-documents style to include (parts of) the FAQ if deemed relevant by contributors.

I don't believe that having cases where the FAQ format is used to contain terms of use should warrant creating a terms type of its own.

[MattiSG]

Voting to reject.