An Overlooked Ingredient for Your Site: How to Write a Privacy Policy
An often overlooked component of website content is the policies page. Not having such a page does not boost consumer confidence, and it may result in your facing an expensive administrative action or losing your site altogether.
I’ve run across many webmasters who say it’s not necessary to include a policies page. On the flip side, many of my clients expect me to just do this for them automatically and at no charge, which I will not do because of potential liability. I think it’s very important for a person who owns a website to make the effort to create a policies page that suits his or her web business, even if it’s a personal blog.
For instance, many website owners use Google’s Adsense program to generate a bit of extra income on their sites. If you have Adsense code on your site, you need to have a privacy policy. Here are Google’s terms:
“You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your user’s browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.”
A free and simple policy generator can be found at SerpRank.com. SerpRank’s privacy policy generator is great because it addresses other commonly used affiliate or pay-per-click programs that use cookies.
Frankly, it is a good idea to have a privacy policy on your website no matter what its content. It is also wise to include a terms and conditions page. If you are selling physical products that you will be shipping, you will also need to include your shipping and delivery terms, defects and returns policies and so forth. People who sell health and nutritional products should research the law to make sure that they are not liable for false medical claims.
The best policy generator that I have found comes with a small price. Attorney and Internet millionaire Shawn Casey studied FTC regulations and consulted many other attorneys in drafting a terms, conditions and policy statement that is sold from his service, the Internet Law Compliance System. It takes just a few minutes to generate your policy page, using Casey’s system. You can tweak it to include any specific information that you may need, such as your shipping policy. Although there are free generators available online, Shawn’s program gives peace of mind:
- There is a 90-day money back guarantee;
- The system includes information about the CAN-Spam act, language with respect to minors in California who may access your website and other matters that you generally will not find in a free policies generator program; and
- Casey is a lawyer. I personally feel a lot better using a policy statement that has been drafted by a lawyer than spun from a free generation system.
If you want to keep your Adsense accounts and/or avoid costly FTC actions, be sure to include a well crafted policies page. While the Internet Legal Compliance System does not deliver a individualized statement reviewed by a lawyer, the main components of the generator have been reviewed by an attorney. Snoop around at Casey’s site, read some horror stories and discover why it is so critical to have a good policy statement.
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