I am asked a lot about whetheror not a particular website wishes an internet privacy policy or not. My reply to all those different websites is the same : for the love of little puppies, yes. Irrespective of what your subject material or nature of your internet site, whatever if you’re making an attempt to Make Money Online or not, you need to have a privacy policy.
NOTE : Now before I get into this any farther I must make one thing terribly CLEAR I’m not A barrister and so donot take anything I post here as legal advice. You are on your own there so if you’re not sure then check with a counsel.
The reason why you need one, as I mentioned in the title of this post, is to cover your ass. With all of the news and talk about the FTC and the changes that are coming you donot want to be unready for the sudden.
An online privacy policy states the terms in which your website handles the personal information that it obtains from anyone who visits your site. What that means for you is that, as you had a posted policy, nobody can come to you after visiting your website and protest that you misused their information or didnt inform them about how their info was going to be used.
You might imagine that you dont need a privacy policy because your website isnt hosted in a state or country which has any laws that protect consumer privacy on the internet. But you are not actually guarded by that if a user who does live in one of those places takes offense to the way their info was used, and you didnt disclose that it might occur in your privacy policy, then you could be liable.
Yes, I know, what are the chances of that going down to your internet site, but you never can say. And frankly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that tough to do, and it covers any likelihood of responsibility, so why wouldnt you do it?
So if you dont have a privacy policy in effect you need to get one now. While you’ll be able to find tons of different examples of privacy policies from all over the internet, dont just copy one from another site and paste in your company name over theirs. You need to be sure that you privacy policy covers you for precisely the way in which you use the information of the users who come to your internet site.
Heres what your privacy policy wishes to include :
- An explanation of how you use that information you collect from your users.
- Your contact information so people can contact you if they have any questions about the privacy policy.
- An explanation of how you will communicate any changes to the privacy policy to your users if/when it happens.
- An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.
Continue reading the remainder of Online Privacy Policy…
