Privacy Policy 101: What Every Website Owner Should Know

Dallas, Texas, USA, 04/21/2017 /SubmitPressRelease123/

Internet Lawyer Mike Young reveals the answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about website privacy policy requirements. If you own a website, this is vital information for protecting yourself from lawsuits and government investigations.

Q: What is a website privacy policy?

A: It’s the legal document that describes the website owner’s policy with respect to the privacy rights of site visitors.

These rights may be multi-tiered. For example, a website visitor may have different rights and responsibilities than a paying customer with access to a restricted membership area.

In addition to the legal aspects, a good privacy policy builds trust between the site owner and visitors.

On the other hand, the lack of a policy (or a poorly drafted one) creates suspicion the website owner is dishonest or an amateur treating the site like a hobby.

Q: Are privacy policies required?

A: Although not all jurisdictions require websites to have privacy policies, some countries and states do.

The problem with this is that most sites do not restrict access by geographic location. This means that if you’ve got a site with visitors from another state that requires sites have privacy policies, you have potential liability issues even if the location(s) where your site is based and hosted do not have such requirements.

Even if you win, it’s costly to defend against a lawsuit by a state’s attorney general or a consumer protection lawyer who attempts to get a class action certified against you as site owner for violating privacy laws you may not have even known existed.

Q: Can I save money by writing my own website’s policy from scratch?

A: Probably not. Imagine you broke your arm with a compact fracture. The bone has pierced the skin.

Would you try to stop the bleeding, stitch up the wound, and set the bone at home with a do-it-yourself cast to save a trip to the emergency room? Chances are you’d end up spending a fortune later in medical bills trying to save the arm from amputation.

The same principle applies to legal issues like online privacy rights. It’s penny-wise and pound foolish to cut corners here pretending to be an experienced Internet business lawyer.

Q: What if I just “borrow” policy provisions I like from a big company’s website like Google or Amazon?

A: First, that’s intellectual property theft, which can lead to a copyright infringement lawsuit or at least a cease-and-desist demand letter from some unhappy corporate attorneys representing the owner you stole from.

To learn more, go to http://mikeyounglaw.com/website-privacy-policy-faqs/2/

source: http://mikeyounglaw.com/website-privacy-policy-faqs/

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