With the way technology is evolving these days, it is no surprise that people are worried about online fraud, identity theft, and the misuse of their personal information. They need to be assured that sensitive data will be protected when using technology, and this applies to web surfing as well.
One of the easiest ways to fix this problem is the creating a Privacy Policy. After all, most major websites have privacy policies, so why shouldn’t blogs? This is especially true when many readers will give you their e-mail address and other personal information to interact with the website, whether it be by posting a comment or signing up for an online newsletter or e-mail RSS feed.
Creating a privacy policy isn’t too difficult. The document should be unique to your blog, but there are a number of issues that all privacy policies should include:
1. Explicit that you won’t sell or give away any user’s e-mail addresses. This is self-explanatory, people don’t want their e-mail addresses to spread across the web, so don’t release e-mail addresses.
2. Make sure to talk about how you may collect information on the browsing habits of users and share this information with advertisers. Also mention that your site may use cookies. Talk about all types of information that you collect (e.g., browser, operating system, IP address, country) and how this information is used.
3. Make sure that you say that you are NOT responsible for the privacy policies for any sites you link to.
4. Reserve the right to change the Privacy Policy at any time.
5. Make sure to provide some method of contact for users concerned about your blog’s privacy policies, preferable inside the Privacy Policy itself.
6. Make it easy to read and understand. If you throw in a lot of legal jargon, people won’t understand it and it will be useless.
7. Obviously, make sure to follow all outlines you set for yourself in the Privacy Policy.
Some points added by Daniel:
8. Depending on the content of your site you might want to add that the use of your site is intended for people who are eighteen (18) years or older (I am not talking about porn… but rather language that might not be proper to kids, or business websites or blogs where the user engage in financial transactions, for instance).
9. If you plan to contact people that access your site for any reason, make sure to add a clause mentioning that. Some bloggers contact people leaving comments on their blogs, for instance.
Please note that the author of this article is not a lawyer, but rather a fellow blogger sharing his experiences with the privacy policies he has created for many of his blogs.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
I’m going to start writing up a privacy policy now. I don’t want to get sued for anything that has to do with my blog.
Hey Aditya,
You have mentioned some very important points up there! Am a novice blogger and my blog doesnt have a privacy policy yet!
Your post has just gotten me thinking seriously about it!
Cheers,
Sanjay Nair
nice article.. thanx
great list of ideas, I’m think I’m going to add “write a privacy policy” to my to do list. It’s important to know what websites are going to do with your information. If you comment on blogs you usually leave your name, email address, and URL, it would be nice to know what those web sites are doing with your data.
Awesome Article… Thanks
Guys, change your Favicon, it really suck!
Other than that everything is great.
Young, that point does not related to pornographic content alone.
If you curse on your blog, for instance, it might not be suitable for kids to read it.
Daniel, thanks for your answer.
By the way, I think point 8 is far away from the theme of the post.
@Victor, yeah perhaps point 9 was badly structured. I changed it now.
@Young, it depends on several factors, like if the blog is owned by a person or by a legal entity and so on. Overall I think it would be difficult to pursue someone that did not respect his privacy policy, unless it harmed you in material ways.
@Ganha, thanks for sharing it.
I do agree that a privacy policy is a good thing to have, not real sure it holds any real weight other than giving your reader the knowledge that those kind of issues are important to you, but that is probably reason enough.
Its important to be clear and even state the obvious in a privacy policy…nothing should be implied to avoid all confusion….in addition you should only make promises you can keep
These kind of recomendation are the common sense (I dont know if this expression exists in English). But I don’t see any problems with an author write in his privacy policy that he wil send SPAMS ou he will sell informations.
The truth will be there.
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I wrote this comment, because I just know advices to do Privacy Policy with these terms.
For who is looking for a easy way to make a privacy policy can go to this site
Yes! I totally agree with the need for a privacy policy. This is both to protect the Internet User as well as the blogger. With everything clearly spelled out, we prevent ourselves from wrongly accused if anything undesirable occurs.
With my blog just migrated from Typepad to WordPress, and given a new look, I guess the only thing missing now is the Privacy Policy!
Cheers
Samantha
I have a question, if someone does not keep his words of the Privacy Policy on his or her blog, will he or she be punished by laws? Of course, his or her reputation will go down to zero, anyway.