Due to low-cost web hosting and various website building tools, starting a website gets easier. You display the site with the most user-friendly structure. You decorate your site with beautiful themes. Then you share your stories or sell products on the site. However, have you put a privacy policy on your site?
I guess many of you, especially if you are small website masters, may think that the privacy policy is for big business websites only. You do not sell anything, and you do not need one. Instead, no matter what purposes you run websites for, you probably need a privacy policy, for you and your visitors.
Why You Need Privacy Policy?
A privacy policy is a document that you can usually find at the bottom of a site, for example, WebHosting2Go.com, if the site has one. You can also see that content of privacy policies from different websites varies too. But almost all privacy policies state what personal information websites collect from visitors, why the sites do that, as well as how to protect the information.
There is not a common definition of personal information either. Some website masters classify names and email addresses into personal information while some others think IPs and cookies are personal information too.
Why You Need A Privacy Policy?
A core part of any privacy policy is personal information. It is valuable data to businesses, advertisers, and even governments while it is also a part of our privacy and privacy is acknowledged as one of the fundamental human rights by many countries and people. So, regarding that, we offer you two reasons that you need a privacy policy as a website master.
Reason 1: Law Requires You To Place A Privacy Policy
A majority of counties have set laws on protecting the privacy of their citizens. They ensure that their citizens can clearly know where their private data goes on by establishing laws. So, if you just have a site in such counties and collect personal information from their citizens, the laws require you to place a privacy policy to inform your visitors about that and meanwhile your protection on the information.
Reason 2: Build Trust With Your Visitors
A privacy policy with a statement of personal information is beneficial to improve your credibility and build trust with your visitors. You can collect personal information in secret. However, once your visitors know that (the possibilities are actually much big), they would feel violated, stay away from your site and even sue you.
By the two reasons, you need a privacy policy. If they are not powerful enough, here is the third reason.
Reason 3: A Third-Party Requires
Third parties such as Amazon Affiliates and Google AdSense will take personal information of your visitors from your site. They require you to write a privacy policy to tell your visitors about that. Or else, these affiliate ad networks will ban your site.
There are more reasons to have a privacy policy. If you still hesitate, why not establish one that is a protection measure for yourself as well.
Write A Privacy Policy
We mentioned that privacy policies vary from different websites. But they have common parts, which consist of:
- Your name and contact information; If your site is an e-commerce website, the name should be your company name.
- Personal information you collect, why you do that and how to protect that.
- Third parties collect your visitors’ personal data, why they do that and how to protect that if your site has any third parties needing collecting data.
- Whether visitors have choices on their private data collected.
Now, you can start to write a privacy policy. The best recommendation is to hire a lawyer to write for you, especially if you run a business site. However, the expense is too high to afford by everyone. If you have a few budgets on privacy policy, you can utilize some tools easily to generate one, like International Privacy Laws by Country, Privacy Policy Generator, and Shopify Privacy Policy Generator.
It’s Time To Place A Privacy Policy Into Your Site
Now, you understand what privacy policy is, why you need it and how to write one. It is time to place one on your website to protect yourself, build trust with your visitors, comply with country laws as well as policies of third parties, etc. But firstly start your own website by clicking here to get best web hosting.
