Any website that collects personal data from users needs a privacy policy agreement. This agreement discloses how you collect, keep and process your users’ personal information.
The law requires you to have this kind of agreement published online and to make it reachable from any pages of your site, so that your users can easily read it at any time.
If you collect personally identifiable information (such as: email address, mailing address, full name and others), you need this kind of agreement. Users need to know what kind of information you collect from them and what are your business intentions with the collected data.
For example, you may ask for their email address to send special offers or notifying them about a new product or service that you have just made available. It’s extremely good that you are promoting your business’ products and services via email, just make sure you include this bit of information in your privacy policy.
What other clauses should a privacy policy have? Here are top 5 important clauses that should be in any privacy policy agreement:
1. Cookies
Nowadays, most websites need to set cookies on their users’ computer at first website visit. Your privacy page needs to have a clause where you mention that you do store cookies and what these cookies files are.
A common explanation on what cookies are is this: Cookies are files with small amount of data, which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a web site and stored on your computer’s hard drive.
2. Collected Personal Information
This clause may get different names, e.g. Collected Data, Collected Personal Information, but it’s mandatory and among most important clauses you need to have in a privacy agreement: what type of personal information you collect from your users.
The most common type of personal information collected consists of: email addresses, full names of your site’s members, mailing addresses and so on.
3. Personal Information Usage
If a “Collected Personal Information” clause would mention what types of data you collect from your users from your website, a “Personal Information Usage” would include what do you plan to do with the data: We use your Personal Information for improving our Site.
4. Security
The security of any kind of information you collect from your valuable customers is extremely important.
No methods of transmitting data over the Internet is 100% secure, but nonetheless you should always ensure your users that their data is protected and secure at every step, through your privacy policy, by including a “Security” clause.
5. Changes To Privacy Policy
Your business grows and you may find you do need to request more information from your users to improve your products, to deliver more services or just want to increase sales on your existing line of products.
If your intentions over the usage of users’ personal information changes or you need to request more data from them, in comparison with what you previously requested, you need to update your privacy policy agreement.
A “Changes To Privacy Policy” clause is important to your users as it clarifies how are you going to notify them about changes to your privacy agreement.