What is Privacy Policy?
A privacy policy for the website is a set of statement that discloses all the possible ways the website collects user data. The contents of privacy policy will depend upon the applicable law and may need to address the requirements of multiple countries or jurisdictions.
Some services like online store takes a lot of personal information from the user that includes sensitive data like credit card number, name, address, phone number, etc. Hence, it is needed to guarantee them that their data will be safe with the site owners and that it will not be misused or sold to third party.
Why should your Website have a Privacy Policy?
Privacy policy basically declares the type of data that is collected from the users and that it will be solely used for the communication or business with the website owners or the company respectively.
This can also guarantee the users that their data will not be misused.
Many online services, social communities and other online business has a privacy policy because they collect user details. But you might be wondering what information can a blog collect when its just an informational blog.
The need for having a privacy policy on a blog also comes when most of the Advertising networks these days including Google Adsense has made it mandatory for the website to have a privacy policy.
Possible ways a Blog can collect user information
Blog Comments: Almost all the blogging CMS have a commenting feature for the blog posts. The most important details taken during commenting are Name and Email ID. These fields are mandatory and must be filled. Of course they are needed to identify the commentator. But, these details can be used to create a list of members to send offers or newsletters to.
Not every bloggers does that but this can be a rogue trick to generate an email list. The names and email ids used on all the comments on the entire blog can be extracted from the database in PHPMyAdmin.
Further this list can be sold to third party at a small price. Many such email list sellers will use forums to sell the list.
Newsletter Sign up: All the bloggers wants to increase their website readership and hence they will provide an option for Newsletter sign up that requires the Name and Email ID of the subscriber.
Here you are intentionally making an email list to send periodical newsletters creating a need of having a Privacy Policy.
Guest post Registration: If you are accepting guest posts then the chances are you providing a registration form on your blog for guests to register themselves. Some blogs can have an email option for submitting guest posts. Many guest posters can provide their personal information that can include their name, photo and email id in the registration form.Hence, having a registration form creates a need of having a privacy policy on your blog.
There are many online privacy policy generators that you can use to create a privacy policy for your blog. But at a times they can seem bigger for your blog because a blog does not collect a lot of personal details from users. You can try this free privacy policy generator service: https://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/
I was shocked to hear about that collecting of information or sharing to other persons. Maybe this is the very reason why private emails still got some spam emails.
Bloggers should stick to their word when they put in their blog that the personal information of users who will comment will be kept private. Bloggers should prove themselves to users that their sites can be trusted.
It wouldn’t be safe if your personal information is shared or worse, sold to a third party. Even though some websites have privacy policy, they still don’t abide to it. I hope that someday these problems will be resolved and users will feel more secure when they submit their personal information.
Sharing of personal information can be a bit unsafe especially when it involves sharing them on the world wide web. The privacy policy should be looked over again to avoid leaking of one’s personal info.
Every website should have a privacy policy so that customers or users would trust them. I mean every website that keep personal data. I wouldn’t be surprised if I get a spam mail because some of the blog owners don’t keep their promise about the privacy of the data.
I had no idea about the importance of some of this privacy policy madness. Many thanks, how are people supposed to know all of the detailed legislation, it’s all a bit of a mine field.
Thanks again.
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