How important is a privacy policy?

[Jonathan]

I've been wondering lately, if I really need to get a privacy policy.

I have a mailing list, and I've very clear to subscribers that I won't do anything with their email address, such as sharing it, etc. Other than that, I don't get anybody's personal information in anyway.

Should I still create a privacy policy? Or is it not a big deal for my website? And how many people actually read a privacy policy when subscribing to a newsletter?

[bill]

Check out the P3P: What it is and what it means to you [webmasterworld.com] thread.

[mivox]

A privacy policy is easy to put together for a site that collects nothing but email addresses. If you took what you already said in your post here, and made it sound a little more "official" that would suffice for a basic privacy policy.

But the P3P standards are definitely something to research for future use... and I plan on complying with them fully, as soon as I find a convenient online P3P generator form.

[paynt]

We also talked about it with recent posts in Those MUST have pages [webmasterworld.com]

[Crazy_Fool]

the uk data protection act applies to all websites in the uk which collect personal data, set cookies and so on. all uk based websites which gather personal data etc must carry some sort of privacy policy somewhere on the website, stating what information you collect (names and addresses) how you collect it (forms, cookies etc), how you use it (as in whether you only use it for yourself or whether you sell the information), how you store the information (securely!) and so on.

see www.dataprotection.gov.uk. there's a PDF file of FAQs for webmasters. click the UMIST link on the main page, then complaince advice and scroll down to the FAQs. there is plenty more information on the site (too much for most people). i found a template for a basic privacy policy somewhere on one of the uk government sites, maybe this one. the EU also has data protection laws which must be obeyed, so worth checking there as well.

what i've done is create a couple of basic privacy policies based on privacy policies of the government sites and some big uk companies that i trust to keep their online documentation up to date.

whatever the exact legal situation, it's worth adding a privacy policy as it helps make your site look more professional. just dont ruin it with poor grammar and spelling!

[Jonathan]

Thanks for all the info, guys.

[john316]

This makes it easy to create a privacy policy, just fill in the blanks and customize the output.

[the-dma.org...]

[Jonathan]

Wow, great tool. Thanks, john316.

[1Lit]

Useful discussion.

I know others have argued this before, but privacy policies are useless. They are not enforced. Even the world's biggest spamming site could put up a neat looking privacy policy.

In fact, if I was a spammer - which I'm not - it's the first thing I'd add to my site, just to reassure people.