Does your website have a privacy policy?

It’s very easy for a small site to decide that this is something that only applies to the big boys who are dealing with credit card details and have an in-house legal team ready to draft the required policy.

However this is a mistake on a number of fronts…

To begin with, as more and more sites move towards Web 2.0 handling, the chances are that your site is dealing with personal information. Maybe you don’t take financial details, for example, but do your users need to provide their email addresses to sign up to leave comments or add content?

More to the point does your site use cookies? Maybe you don’t have a clue about how you’d go about adding your own cookie, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 is taking advantage of third-party content and services and many of these depend on cookies. Add the snippet of code to enable Google AdSense ads or Analytics, for example, and Google will be tracking your visitors’ IP address as they move through your site and part of its terms is that you should have a privacy policy explaining as much.

The bottom line is that every site, no matter how small, should have a privacy policy. The good news is that it needn’t be intimidating or expensive – thanks to Web 2.0.

Search for “privacy policy template” and you’ll find a number of customisable privacy policies such as the one from website-law.co.uk.  Leave the link back to the source and you can use it for free (a great example of SEO 2.0 in action).

Of course it’s still a bit of a chore to create your custom policy, but it’s well worth it and not just from the warm glow that comes from knowing you’re on the right side of the law and doing the right thing. The small privacy policy link on each page is a clear indication of credibility and professionalism: an indicator that is almost certainly recognised by search engines as well as end users.