Do I Truly Warrant an Online Privacy Policy?

I’m asked a lot about whetheror not a selected internet site needs an online privacy policy or not. My answer 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 website, whatever if you are trying to Make Money Online or not, you have to have a privacy policy.

NOTE : Now before I get into this any farther I do need to make one thing very CLEAR I AM NOT A counsel and thus donot take anything I post here as legal services. You are on your own there so if you are undecided then check with a lawyer.

The reason why you need one, as I discussed 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 donot wish to be unprepared for the astonishing.

A web privacy policy states the terms under which your internet site handles the personal information that it obtains from anyone who visits your site. What that means for you is that, because you had a posted policy, noone can come to you after visiting your internetsite and protest that you misused their info or didnt inform them about how their info 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 shopper privacy on the web. 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 info was used, and you didnt disclose that it would happen in your privacy policy, then you might be responsible.

Yes, I know, what are the possibilities of that going down to your website, but you never can tell. And frankly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that hard to do, and it covers any chance of guilt, so why wouldnt you do it?

So if you donot 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 web, do not just copy one from another site and paste in your company name over theirs. You need to make sure that you privacy policy covers you for precisely the way you use the info of the users who come to your website.

Heres what your privacy policy wishes 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 how you use that information you collect from your users.
• An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.

Continue reading the rest of Online Privacy Policy…