Do I Seriously Need an Online Privacy Policy?
I get asked a lot about whether a selected internet site needs an internet privacy policy or not. My reply to all those different websites is the same : for the love of little puppies, yes. No matter what your subject matter or nature of your internet site, whatever if you’re attempting to Make Money Online or not, you have to have a privacy policy.
NOTE : Now before I get into this any further I must make one thing terribly CLEAR I AM NOT A counsel and so don’t take anything I post here as legal advice. You are on your own there so if you’re unsure 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 stories and talk about the FTC and the changes that are coming you don’t want to be unready for the unexpected.
An online privacy policy states the terms and conditions in which your internet site handles the personal information that it obtains from anyone that visits your site. What that suggests for you is that, as you had a posted policy, nobody can come to you after visiting your website and complain that you misused their info or didnt inform them about how their information was going to be used.
You may think that you donot need a privacy policy because your internet site isnt hosted in a state or country which has any laws that protect consumer privacy online . But you are not really protected by that if a user who does live in one of those places takes offense to the way their information 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 possibilities of that happening to your internet site, but you never can say. And frankly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that hard to do, and it covers any possibility 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 lots of different examples of privacy policies from all over the web, 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 exactly how you use the information of the users who come to your internet site.
Heres what your privacy policy desires to incorporate :
- An explanation of how you will communicate any changes to the privacy policy to your users if/when it happens.
- Your contact information so people can contact you if they have any questions about the privacy policy.
- An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.
- An explanation of how you use that information you collect from your users.
Continue reading the remainder of Online Privacy Policy…



