I am asked a lot about whether a particular site wishes an internet privacy policy or not. My response to all those different internet sites is the same : for the love of little puppies, yes. Irrespective of what your subject material or nature of your site, no matter if you are trying to Make Money Online or not, you need to have a privacy policy.

NOTE : Now before I get into this any further I should make one thing VERY CLEAR I’m not A counsel and therefore don’t take anything I post here as legal services. You are on your own there so if you are unsure then check with abarrister.

The reason why you need one, as I mentioned in the title of this post, is to cover your ass. With all the stories and talk about the FTC and the changes that are coming you don’t want to be unprepared for the astonishing.

An internet privacy policy states the terms and conditions under which your site 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, noone can come to you after visiting your internetsite and bitch that you misused their info or didnt inform them about how their info was going to be used.

You might imagine that you donot need a privacy policy because your site isnt hosted in a state or country which has any laws that protect buyer privacy on the web. But you are not really 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 might be responsible.

Yes, I know, what are the probabilities of that occuring to your website, but you never can tell. And overtly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that hard to do, and it covers any likelihood of responsibility, so why wouldnt you do it?

So if you donot have a privacy policy in effect you want to get one now. While you can find heaps of different examples of privacy policies from all over the internet, do not just copy one from another site and paste in your company name over theirs. You want to make certain that you privacy policy covers you for precisely the way you use the data of the users who come to your site.

Heres what your privacy policy desires to incorporate :

  • An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.
  • Your contact information so people can contact you if they have any questions about the privacy policy.
  • An explanation of how you use that information you collect from your users.
  • An explanation of how you will communicate any changes to the privacy policy to your users if/when it happens.

Continue reading the rest of Online Privacy Policy…

Filed under: Online Business, Promotion and Marketing

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