When you operate a business online, you owe it to your web site’s visitors as well as your customers to provide them with a privacy policy. In fact, if you plan on doing business within the United States, the FTC requires you to have a privacy policy clearly shown on your web site in a location that can easily be seen. Think this is a bunch of hot air and that they’ll never catch you? Think again. All it takes is a single complaint and you could be facing a significant fine. Many business take this seriously and won’t do business with you if you don’t have a privacy policy in place. For example, Google will not accept advertisements from you if you don’t have one that they approve of in place.
OK, so what is a privacy policy? It’s a document in which you outline what information you collect from customers, how you handle / secure it and what you will use the information for. Information you collect from customers isn’t simply their email address or credit card information. Cookies are also part of this information gathering as well. How are cookies that you have in place on your site going to be handled? Why do you use them?
The bottom line with a privacy policy is that you’ve got to clearly state your commitment to your site’s visitor and customer privacy and data security. There are several places online where you can go to get a sample privacy policy that you can edit to conform to your business. If you’d like to take a look at a sample, the Better Business Bureau (bbbonline dot org) has one available for you to take a look at. In addition, there are also free WordPress plugins available that will generate a privacy policy automatically for you.
The five key points your privacy policy must include are:
1. A complete description of exactly how data is collected from your visitors and customers when they visit your site.
2. A description of exactly what information you collect from them.
3. An explanation – in plain English – of what it is that you do with their information, along with where it is that you store the information and how you handle the storage of this information.
4. You must include information pertaining to the sharing of the data you collect with third parties.
5. Information on how your customers or visitors can go about removing or changing information that you have collected from them.
6. If accepting credit cards on your site, you’ll also need to include information on how you will handle your customers credit card data. There are specific regulations regarding this that you must follow, or you could face significant fines. To ensure you are handing this data correctly, be sure to visit pcicomplianceguide dot org.
The bottom line is that not only is it the law that you provide your customers and visitors with a privacy policy, it only makes good sense to do so. The more comfortable your visitors are in doing business with you, the more those visitors will turn into customers.
