Disclaimer: The information in this blog post should not be considered legal advice. I’ll share with you proven ways to create a privacy policy for your website which we use. Nevertheless, please keep in mind that nothing can substitute a professional legal consultancy in the drafting of your privacy policy and making it compliant to the law.
Many countries have enforceable data regulations and businesses are expected to comply. In some cases, non-compliance with these regulations may lead to fines and damage to the reputation of your business. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that you meet the legal obligations. But let’s be frank, if you’re not a legal professional, making sure that your website is legally compliant and creating privacy policy on your own may be challenging.
What Should Be In A Privacy Policy?
A privacy policy is one of the key components the most websites that collect date from their visitors, should have. Simply put, it should explain how a business handles any information received from a website visitor.
The basic elements that your privacy policy should include are the following:
- Who is a website owner?
- What data is being collected and how?
- What is the legal basis for the data collection? (e.g a consent necessary for your service or a legal obligation)
- For which specific purposes are the data collected?
- Which third parties will have access to the information?
- The effective date of the privacy policy
How To Create A Privacy Policy?
If you’re familiar with the ways your website handles the information of the visitors and can answer the above questions, in theory, you can draft a privacy policy on your own. If you don’t have any legal background, it may take you some time to figure out the right phrasings that won’t be ambiguous. Nevertheless, it’ll be reasonable to give your policy draft to a lawyer for revision to ensure the policy meets all the requirements.
Maybe you didn’t have such an idea but I’ll mention it – you should NOT copy the privacy policy from your competitor’s website. Firstly, like any other content, it’s protected by copyright. Secondly, it may not be applicable to your business if you use other third-party integrations and handle the data differently. Therefore, the policy won’t be valid for you.
Moreover, you may hire a lawyer to create a privacy policy for you but it’s not a cheap solution.
The best way we found to handle all our legal pages, the privacy policy included, is to use legal pages generators. Now, there are a lot of them which provide a low level of services but iubenda and Termly are those you should consider using.
Both services provide high-quality output and have a similar set of features. Although, Termly focuses on the USA and UK only, while iubenda covers all countries. It’s like using an international legal team at the convenience of an online software solution. And this team is working to keep your privacy policy compliant with all international regulations. If any changes in the law happen after you generate your privacy policy, it’ll be updated automatically. You also have a user-friendly dashboard to make changes in the legal text on your own, if needed.
What’s The Deal?
You can get starting plans for the services for free if you’ll use it for your blog or startup on the initial stage. In other cases, iubenda will require the investment of $27 yearly per website or app. Termly Pro+ plan goes with €8 per month. Paid plans cover not only the generation of the privacy policy. They also include the creation of other legal pages.
To me, those prices for handling the legal information and taking this task off your plate, are more than reasonable. Especially if you consider how much a lawyer would charge for the creation of the privacy policy and keeping it up-to-date.
To sum it up, the creation of the privacy policy on your own may be challenging and confusing. But luckily there are decent and proven services out there like Termly and iubenda. For a fair price, they generate legal information for you and make your website compliant.
