If you collect any information from your viewers on your website at all – an optin to your newsletter, an email form they fill out, Google Analytics, and in particular if you sell anything on your site or do business in some way with people via your site, you are or may be legally required to have a Privacy Policy page on your website.
LAWYERS
If you really want to be careful, and there are many of you who should, a lawyer familiar with website Privacy Policies should craft or at least review your Privacy Policy. This isn’t practical for a lot of people, so here are some tips that will help you without paying for legal advice.
WHAT IT SHOULD INCLUDE
I encourage you to do your own research into this subject – there are plenty of articles on the internet to help educate you – but the three clauses that are essential to include in your Privacy Policy are:
1. How and What Type of Information You Collect
2. What You Do With the Information You Collect
2. Your Use of Cookies
(Cookies are small files on your computer that track what you do on a website. They are, among other things, what allows you to add something to a shopping cart so that the item is still in the cart when you go there to check out. They can help your computer remember pages you visited so it’s easier to find that page again later.)
PRIVACY POLICY GENERATORS
Three websites recognized for the quality of the Privacy Policies they generate are listed here. Make sure that you and/or a lawyer review what is generated. This article is in no way intended as legal advice, only a good starting place, and better than nothing.
All three of these services can be gotten in free or paid versions (which afford greater detail) and use questionnaires to narrow down what you may or may not need on your website.
1. Iubenda: https://www.iubenda.com/en
2. TermsFeed: https://termsfeed.com/
3. Shopify (their Privacy Policy Generator): https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator
Email us at hello@21thirteen.com or call us at 646 808 0249 to learn more or get help with your Privacy Policy.
