Two good reasons to develop a privacy policy
- Create more confidence in your website visitors by being transparent about how you handle their information
- Follow laws established that pertain to your business
A privacy policy is more than just a document though. It should actually be the policy by which your company operates. If you use cookies to track what people buy or shop for on your site - then you need to tell people what kind of cookies you use and how you manage that information. Are you going to sell this browsing or shopping information? Will you share it with third parties and affiliates?
The same applies to the email address. It is a frowned-upon practice to sell or share email addresses. If you offer an opt-in or email subscriber form on your website, you need to tell people how you plan to use their email.
You can also eliminate stress and concerns about abuse of personal information. Birthdays, addresses, credit cards and Mother's maiden names are all considered non-public information and can be extremely valuable to identity thieves. Give your shoppers confidence that you will not share, distribute or sell this information,
Various legislations and legal guidelines require businesses to uphold certain standards regarding non-public information but there are increasing developments pertaining to website conduct. For example, in the US and in the UK, policies are being developed and may affect your website, depending on what information you collect, how you do it, and what you do with it. The European Union has developed similar guidelines that contain a bit too much legal rhetoric to be completely useful.
Formatting an Online Privacy Policy
Your policy should be written in plain speaking, readable language. Avoid overly technical or legal jargon that is difficult to understand. The policy should be a part of your site and inconspicuously displayed. Design the policy and publish it like the rest of your site. Design it as if you expect and desire people to read it. Make it short, friendly & intuitive. It should be easily accessible throughout your site - usually a link in the footer menu will suffice.
A Sample Privacy Policy
Example of a portion of a Privacy Policy:
http://www.mysite.com/ uses http://www.opentracker.net/ to collect visitor data and analyze traffic on our site. This information helps us understand customer interests and helps us improve our website. When you visit our site, the pages that you look at, and a short text file called a cookie, are downloaded to your computer. A cookie is used to store small amounts of information. This information is collected for traffic analysis only. The cookie does not contain personal details. Depending on the browser that you use, you can set your preferences to block/ refuse cookies, and/ or notify you before they are placed. Opentracker does not sell, give, or trade the statistics they store to any 3rd parties for data-mining or marketing purposes. Please visit http://www.opentracker.net/pages/support.jsp for their privacy policy.
Creating your privacy policy
Tell your visitors why tracking cookies are good, why the information is beneficial, that it is used to improve websites and their content. Give an example. If you are collecting information, tell them what you do with that information. Give people an opportunity not to have their info collected, for example by blocking cookies. Explain how people can block cookies. Also explain that cookies are not harmful and cannot introduce viruses or extract personal contact information.
Cookies vs. Spyware
There is an important distinction to be made here between cookies and spyware. Spyware collects information about your surfing habits across the internet and sends this information out from your computer. Cookies collect information about your surfing habits only on the site of the provider of the cookie, in other words just on one site.
As stated at Opentracker (dot) net - "From our research it appears that most people are concerned that their personal information may be passed on. In this case, there is an important distinction to make between Two Types of Information which are collected:
- Personally identifiable info/ personal contact info
- Clickstream/ navigation info
Specific to concerns about cookies, the information being collected does not contain personally identifiable information. Clickstreams are used to see if people return to the same sites, and identify patterns.
When databases are combined, for example a membership & login base, with a clickstream tracking system, it is possible to combine personal information, such as an email address, with clickstreams. This is where the main cause for concern seems to lie."
The companies that do this; with the resources to combine clickstreams, past purchases, and personal information, are household names, such as amazon.com, ebay, bbc, yahoo, etc.
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