Privacy policies are required on most websites by international, federal, state, and local laws.
Did you realize that most websites are required to have a legal policy that explains what it does with visitors information? It’s true! If you do as little as install Google Analytics or have a contact form on your website, you are required (by law) to have a privacy policy. Both of these scenarios (and dozens more) constitute collecting PII, or personally identifiable information.
Here’s a video by Termageddon (the people who provide our policies) about how the laws work.
The author of this article is not a lawyer, and this information does not provide legal advice. For any legal advice, please contact your attorney.
How do I get a privacy policy?
You have a few options when it comes to getting a legitimate privacy policy.
- Hire an attorney to draft up your policy for you.
- Use a policy generator.
Hiring a privacy attorney
Hiring a privacy attorney will be the most effective way of getting the best privacy policy in place for your website. They can assess your individual needs and provide you with a legal document you can place on your website. Most attorney’s will stand by their work and offer some sort of protection.
The downside to this approach is the expense. It could cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to draft your policy. Beyond that, any time you make significant changes to your website that affect your policy, or laws change regarding privacy on the internet, you’ll have to go back to your lawyer to have it revised.
Use a policy generator
Because of the cost involved, most small business websites opt for using a policy generator instead of hiring an attorney. Since its inception, I’ve been using Termageddon for all my privacy policies and terms of use documents.
They provide a robust generator that will walk you through answering all the questions that produce the right policy for your website. In the end, you’ll be provided with a short code you place on your website that will display your privacy policy and give Termageddon the ability to automatically updated the policy for you as the laws change.
If you are searching for alternatives, Iubenda and Termly offer the same type of service (but I have not used it).