B2B Markeplace

I get asked a lot about whether a selected website needs an internet privacy policy or not. My reply to all those different internet sites is the same : for the love of little puppies, yes. No matter what your subject material or nature of your site, whatever if you are making an attempt to Make Money Online or not, you need to have a privacy policy.

NOTE : Now before I am getting into this any farther I must make one thing very CLEAR I’m not Alawyer and thus donot take anything I post here as legal advice. You are on your own there so if you are not sure then check with a counsel.

The reason why you need one, as I discussed in the title of this post, is to cover your ass. With all the reports and talk about the FTC and the changes that are coming you donot wish to be unready for the unexpected.

An online privacy policy states the conditions in which your website handles the personal information that it obtains from anyone who visits your site. What that implies for you is that, because you had a posted policy, nobody can come to you after visiting your website and bitch that you misused their info or didnt inform them about how their information was going to be used.

You might imagine that you dont need a privacy policy because your website isnt hosted in a state or country that has any laws that protect buyer privacy on the web. But you are not really guarded by that if a user who does live in one of those places takes offense to the way their information was employed, and you didnt disclose that it would occur in your privacy policy, then you might be liable.

Yes, I know, what are the chances of that occuring to your internet site, but you never know. And honestly, putting a link to a privacy policy on your homepage is not that hard to do, and it covers any likelihood of responsibility, so why wouldnt you do it?

So if you dont have a privacy policy in effect you want to get one now. While you’ll be able to find lots of different examples of privacy policies from all over the Net, do not just copy one from another site and paste in your company name over theirs. You want to make sure that you privacy policy covers you for precisely how you use the data of the users who come to your site.

Heres what your privacy policy needs to incorporate :

• An explanation of how you will communicate any changes to the privacy policy to your users if/when it happens.
• An explanation of how you use that information you collect from your users.
• Your contact information so people can contact you if they have any questions about the privacy policy.
• An explanation of what kind of information you collect from people who visit your site.

Continue to read the remainder of Online Privacy Policy…