With spam and other invasions of privacy ever on the increase, it’s important that you can reassure and justify to your site visitors your commitment to privacy and what you will do with any information they provide.
Most larger, e-commerce based sites carry a Privacy Statement. Some of these are simple and others very daunting – so daunting in fact that even the site owners using them don’t even understand their contents – and it’s important that they do.
A good Privacy Statement declares what your site contains, the kinds of information the site gathers and what how that information is used.
The good news is, you really don’t need to go to the expense of hiring a legal team to put together a suitable privacy statement, there’s a number of online wizards available from reputable sources to help you with this task.
When using these wizards, you’ll usually be asked to supply details such as:
– The type of information gathered from traffic reporting and server log applications (and why)
– Whether cookies are issued from your site and what they actually do
– Security systems in place to protect other people’s details
– Whether your site contains forums or message boards.
– Whether your advertising partners use tracking devices for their ads on your site.
– If you provide links to other sites
– Options for people to unsubscribe from your mailing lists.
– How people can contact you
By doing a little bit of preparatory work before starting on these wizards, you can save a great deal of time. To generate a privacy statement it will take between half an hour to an hour. Bear in mind that a Privacy Statement is a legal document, so be sure you state the correct information on your page.
Once your privacy statement is generated, copy and paste the code into a page and then link it from every page on your site using the text, “Privacy”.
You can generate your own Privacy Statement, free of charge on the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Web site:
http://cs3-hq.oecd.org/scripts/pwv3/pwhome.htm
By creating a detailed, yet easy to read Privacy Statement, you’ll demonstrate to your visitors your commitment to them – and a reassured visitor is more likely to become a paying client.
Michael Bloch is the Business Operations Manager of ThinkHost, a USA based company that has been providing hosting solutions to the world since 1999.
