This post is part of our series: Find Out Fast If Your Business is GDPR Ready. Our goal is to help businesses make sense of privacy and data. AE is your Babel Fish for GDPR Legalese.
What is a Privacy Policy?
Simply put, a Privacy Policy is a document that tells your customer what data you’re going to collect from them, how you’ll use it and who you’ll share it with.
Why You Need a Privacy Policy
If you have a business website, you should have a Privacy Policy. It’s important that your business models best practice, plus it’s likely that you’ll need one to meet your online legal requirements.
Take heart.? It doesn’t have to include swaths of pages of legalese. In fact, the more straightforward and simple you can make your Privacy Policy, the more your customers will trust you.
Great Examples of Privacy Policies
Writing a Privacy Policy can be awfully dry. We’ve collected a few examples of companies who have added personality to their boring documents, and managed to make them more interesting — even friendly. Almost as though you’re talking to their best customer service reps.
We’re huge fans of Xero and their Privacy Policy is clear and to-the-point. Marvel in its readability!
Typeform have, of course, used a form to display their Privacy Policy as well as their terms and conditions. Do check out their plain English version. It rocks.
MailChimp has done a pretty good job as well on their Privacy Policy. They deal with a lot of customer data and have clearly marked out how they use it.
We love the fellas at HelpDocs.io and we use their service. They also break down the complex world of privacy well.
We’re pretty proud of the work we’ve done on our own Privacy Promise.
Some Helpful Resources For Writing a Privacy Policy
The DMA (Data and Marketing Association), based in New York describes the outline your Privacy Policy should follow in their post How To Construct Your Privacy Policy.
Here’s what they recommend including:
- Contact Information
- The personal data you collect and use
- Whether you use cookies
- What kind of information will be shared with 3rd parties
- Marketing Preferences
- Review and Changes
- Notifications
- Security
- Enforcement
- Changes
- Effective Date
There are even several privacy policy generators available online. These can be helpful to get you started, but always get actual legal advice so you know you are covered.
Here are a few privacy policy generators you can check out if you’re interested:
How to Explain AE’s Service in Your Privacy Policy
To help you construct your own policy when you’re using AE Connect, it’s important to know several things:
What Data Does AE Collect?
The short answer is, it’s different depending on the service your customer registers with. We’ve broken down the information AE collects by service to help you fill in your Privacy Policy more easily.
Does AE Use Cookies?
The short answer is yes. Check out our Web Beacons and Cookie Guide.
AE’s Privacy Promise
We deal in customer data every day. We know the companies who work with us trust us to keep their data secure and private. This is a huge deal to us and we don’t take the job lightly.
We have a Privacy Promise that outlines how we collect data and what we do with it. It’ll probably give you some ideas for your own.
Best of luck writing your own Privacy Policy. Of course, we always recommend you have the Privacy Policy you come up with reviewed by a smart and trustworthy lawyer.
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