I haven't really thought about this much before, but I have a specific application I'm building where I want to provide the customer with a brief note (that they can agree to), with the standard boilerplate, e.g. "we are collecting your information for internal use, we will not sell it to spammers", etc.

I should mention, we basically want to pull in the customer's email, name, phone (optional), zip and field for internal marketing purposes. No truly personal information will be collected. Technically the email is all we really need but we want to get an idea of the our customer demographics and send emails to specific targeted markets.

Is there a standard out there I can go by? Do most other sites just make it up as they go? I've clicked "I agree" on countless forum entry pages with only a glance at what it said, and most of them seem to be copied-and-pasted or rehashed from other forums or other websites.

A related question: by saying "I agree", what sort of legally binding agreement have you and your customer made at that point? Just your word?