What is a Good Privacy Policy?

Privacy Policies are a big issue these days. Surprisingly, many online businesses do not realize the legal requirements of having a good privacy policy…and some don’t have privacy policies at all! If you don’t have a privacy policy that is up to standard, please make it a project for this week to get yourself legal.

And remember, if you use third-party credit card processors (ex. PayPal) or a third party mailing list manager (ex. Yahoo! Groups), you must let your visitors know this and include links to these companies’ privacy policies.
Read Lynette Chandler's article to learn what is a good privacy policy. This article will tell you how to write a privacy policy for free.
 

Value Your Visitor Privacy - Creating A Policy For Your Web Site
by Lynette Chandler
Online privacy is a hot topic today. As more people learn about what has been done with their information and information collected online, sirens go off when your website asks visitors for some information. This isn't any wonder; the way some businesses online handle information even I despise it.
But as business people who have an online presence, we cannot choose to ignore this. In fact, safeguarding your customers' information is the law in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

The EU has even tighter standards that have repercussions far and wide. Just because you cater to a particular country doesn't mean you are safe. Remember, the Internet is global in reach. Therefore, you should really put up a privacy policy if you
haven't already.

What your policy should contain:

What - 
What kind of information do you collect? 
Is it personally identifiable? 
Are you tracking click paths? 
Do you use cookies? 

Do not exclude your server logs even though every site has server logs. Since logs do, in some way, give you a little information about your visitors visiting frequencies and IP, your visitor should know it and let them make their own decisions.


When - 
When do you collect this information? 
During registration? 
Checkout? 
Contact Page?

Who -
Do you collect these for every visitor? 
Members only or customers only?
Why - 
Why are you collecting this? 

The most common reason to collect this is to evaluate your traffic and cookies help customize a members preferences when they visit your site. Anytime you have a login that has a remember me or customize your page option there are cookies involved. If you track more than that make sure you give a solid reason why you need it? Does it in turn benefit the user? Is it for internal use or external?

Where - 
Do you keep your data? 
Database or files? 
Are they encrypted? 
How much value do you place on your visitors information? What have you done to protect that data?

How - 
IP tracking? 
Link tracker? 
Cookies?

Be as thorough as possible when constructing your privacy policy. If something in the policy makes you feel uncomfortable, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing that in the first place. 

Saying too much may be problematic, but saying too little could leave you in a very bad position. So include what a customer has a right to know and omit
carefully. This is not to say you should divulge company secrets. Just provide enough information to maintain some level of transparency.

Who's going to read it anyway?

I'm the first to admit that I am not one who'll read every line of an agreement or a privacy policy even though it's been drummed into my head to do so. 

It's not that I'm being apathetic, but when I have but so much time, I tend to scan it. While only a handful will actually scrutinize your policy, it will help you when you're accused of not protecting your visitors' privacy, which could result in litigation. 

Should you have a legal adviser draft it? I would think it is best to have professional consultation. If you can't, you can always write the best one you know how or head over to these two sites for a Q & A based Human Readable Privacy Policy generator.

The DMA Privacy Policy Generator
http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

Privacy Bot
http://www.privacybot.com/cgi-bin/pbquestions.plx?pageID=stepone

OECD
http://cs3-hq.oecd.org/scripts/pwv3/pwhome.htm 

P3P Privacy Policy

So far we've only talked about Human Readable Privacy Policy. If you're truly concerned, you should have a P3P Privacy Policy. 

What is it? 
Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is a global standard for online Privacy Policies. The P3P copy of your privacy policy runs in the background and compares your privacy practices against the user's settings. If it doesn't comply it will warn with a popup to the user.

Not all browsers support P3P, however the popular IE6 and Mozilla do. If 80% of your visitors are using these browsers and you don't have a P3P policy, chances are a good number of your visitors get warnings about your site's privacy practices. Notice I don't say all your visitors. This is because the warnings are always matched to your visitor's browser settings.

How to create P3P Machine Readable Privacy Policies

There are a number of tools to do this:

P3PEdit
http://p3pedit.com/

IBM p3p Policy Editor
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/p3peditor

W3C Recommendation
http://fs.pics.enc.or.jp/p3pwiz/p3p_en.html

P3P Developer
http://www.p3pdeveloper.com/

Further reading about P3P:

http://www.p3ptoolbox.org/

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

Articles on the other side of the fence:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,13242,00.html

Footnote: Having a policy does not protect surfers from data collection. From the business viewpoint, it does help create some form of transparency in the hope to gain trust. Ultimately your visitors will need to evaluate and think for themselves if your policy is acceptable to them.

©Lynette Chandler

Lynette is owner of MarketingRight. She has 12 years of experience in various levels of Marketing & Management. As an Entrepreneur she also writes and support scripts for Internet Profitability and offers her expertise to home-based and small businesses. For more business news & articles, visit http://www.Search-WWW.com.