On a daily basis, we hear about privacy laws that have been implemented by certain states to protect personal information. So what does this have to do with your business website?
In today’s world, privacy policies on your website are not “nice to have” ideas, they’re required and they show a commitment to transparency to your customers on how you will or won’t use their data. Personal data that includes various types of information, including names, photos, email addresses, bank account details, IP addresses of personal computers, and even biometric data. Some of this information is most likely being captured by your website.
Even if you gather basic information like analytics, via cookies, your privacy policy should indicate that you are doing that. If you follow through with what you say you will do in your privacy policy, your business is in compliance and you should be legally protected.
Almost all major privacy regulations require that your privacy policy clearly address the following:
This means that you should disclose if you collect Geolocations, IP addresses, or anything that can determine an individual user session. Let your visitors know what you are using their data for, like to improve your user’s experience. Let them know that their data may be passed on by another entity that will have access to their data, like your payment processors, e-commerce platforms that manage your backend, third-party apps, widgets, social buttons, and ad service integrations. Also, what are their user rights in terms of things like the right to request, view, transfer, and erase their data?
All this and more should be outlined in your policies. Even if your website is hosted through popular web hosting providers like Shopify, WordPress, GoDaddy or even Wix, many of them contain built-in analytics tools attached to your website. So you may not be collecting your visitor’s information, but your hosting provider could be collecting your website information and therefore your visitors.
Every business is different, so privacy policies are not “one size fits all”. Many of the privacy laws and bills do not care about where a business is located or the size of the company. Because of this, we recommend to all our clients that they consider not only having a Privacy Policy, but also having a strategy to keep it up to date over time.
This is why we provide a Termageddon license for all of our Essential and Premium Web Care Plan clients. Termageddon not only helps our clients quickly generate a Privacy Policy for their website, but their team monitors privacy laws and can automatically update their policies when the laws change. They are the only Privacy Policy generator listed as a trusted vendor by the IAPP.org, an organization consisting of 60,000 privacy attorneys and professionals. We even use Termageddon on our own website.
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