How To Privacy Policy
Contents
Your Privacy Statement
describes how you handle information about the visitors of your website. You have to make a clear statement describing how each bit of data you gather is used. You should have a privacy policy if:
- You set Cookies
- Use Web Bugs (Tracking)
- Use Flash and it stores LSOs (Flash Cookies)
- Collect any Personal Identifiable Information
- Collect any information from children
For a detailed explanation of these things: Look here
Samples and Helpful Links
For a sample privacy policy you may take a look at the WOT privacy policy.
For help in creating your own privacy policy, The Direct Marketing Association has some good advice as well as a free, online privacy policy generator.
Other references:
- Fair Information Practice Principles
- Network Advertising Initiative
- EFF - Best Practices for Online Service Providers
- BBBonline - Sample Privacy Notice
- Deceptive Trade Practices
- IT & e-commerce Section UK Government
Information Sharing and Disclosure
If you collect any Personal Identifiable Information, you need to tell the customer what you will do with it (e.g. whether you will share it with 3rd parties).
You must ensure their safety and not rent, sell, or share personal information with other people/companies. You may state exceptions to this, e.g. to share the address of a customer with a delivery service.
Cookies and Tracking Cookies
Please tell the user what cookies are and why you set them. If cookies not belonging to your site are set, e.g. by advertisement companies or usage trackers, list them and provide a link to the privacy statement of the third-party company.
Please note that the following texts are just examples, you need to change them according to your usage of cookies/advertisers/trackers ...
Example Cookies:
- "A cookie is a piece of text stored by your web browser on your computer. We use it too remember and process the items in your shopping cart, track your preferences for future visits, to access your information when you sign in so we can provide you with your personalized content, to display the most appropriate advertisements, compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future."
Example Advertising Cookies:
- "We use other companies to show advertisements on some of our pages. These other companies set and access their own cookies and their use of them is subject to their own privacy policies. Advertisers or other companies do not have access to our cookies. This is a list of all third-party companies that set cookies: ..."
Example Tracking Cookies:
- "We use allow some services to track the usage of our page. These other companies set and access their own cookies and their use of them is subject to their own privacy policies. These companies do not have access to our cookies. This is a list of all third-party companies that set tracking cookies: ..."
How do I find if and which cookies my page sets?
An easy way to get a list of all cookies that your web page sets is to use Firefox privacy mode. How to browse privately? Look here. After starting private browsing mode, enter the url of your site and go to it. Click a bit around, but don't leave your site!
After doing that: Click Tools menu -> Options -> Privacy and choose "remove individual cookie". In this window you see all cookies that your page has set, including those set by external content.
