A privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses and manages a customer or client’s data. This is not something to take lightly. Your business needs to follow the policy by implementing necessary security measures to protect your customers’ data. Failure to follow your business’s privacy policy can result in lawsuits, legal fees, and/or fines.
Having a solid policy is important not only to avoid trouble but also to increase your business-customer relationship. Online customers have been burned one too many times in the past few years. Facebook®, one of the most popular sharing sites in the world, was recently found guilty of misleading customers and misusing their data. Facebook® had a privacy policy in place but chose to not follow it. They were lucky to avoid millions in fines. The Facebook® debacle has been a huge blow to customer confidence in recent years.
Crafting A Privacy Policy
It’s important that your policy can be understood by everyone. Customers care about what is happening with their information. One of the first things that a customer does when they arrive to your website is scan for security, social proof, and your privacy policy. Also, if it is full of legal jargon and is impossible to understand, potential customers might abandon your page and find another company with a similar product that they can understand and trust.
Write your policy in basic English, determine what information you’ll be potentially gathering from consumers such as email addresses, credit card numbers, login information, cookies, and identify what you’ll be doing with it (if anything). If there is something you’ll be doing with a customer’s information that seems unsavory, instead of leaving it out, it’s better to stop the sketchy practice. I.E. “I’ll be using phone numbers to find a nice Friday night date.” Instead of stalking your customers, maybe you could just focus on being less weird. 🙂
Things That Should Be Included:
1. Write the policy in simple English (aim for a 9th grade level).
2. Inform customers about what information will be collected and whether it could be identifying.
3. What information specifically is being collected?
4. Will you be sharing information with anyone such as partners, affiliates?
5. List the state and federal privacy laws and initiatives that you comply with.
6. Make opting-out easy and explain how it works.
7. State that the policy will be updated regularly. Then actually do it.
Note: Depending on what your website is about or who it’s directed to you may want to include details relating to; Google® and Apple’s® privacy requirements, COPPA, CalOPPA, the CAN-SPAM Act, FTC Fair Information Practices etc.
Need Assistance Creating Your Privacy Policy?
It can be difficult writing the perfect policy but there are easy, cost-effective ways to do it. We recommend and use the following services:
FreePrivacyPolicy.com, offers a free service that helps you craft the perfect privacy policy for your website, blog or mobile app in under 15 minutes.
If you’d like your privacy policy to also increase your visitor or shopper trust and confidence, getting you more opt-ins and more sales, you should take a look at TrustGuard.com/privacy-policy-generator.htm. Trust Guard® lets you build multiple Professional Policies and tell the world about them with their Privacy Verified trust seal service. This is the ultimate third-party trust seal that you display on your website or blog, instantly showing your company’s dedication to customer-centric practices, honesty, transparency, automatically building a relationship of trust and loyalty. Trust Guard even offers a DOUBLE your money back Guarantee!
Not only can the right Privacy Policy protect your business from being singled out for deceptive practices, it can also increase your bottom line.
