Getting a Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions document
Every website which collects and processes any personal information needs to have a clear Privacy Policy, plus a Cookie Policy and have your Terms and Conditions accessible on your website.
This data typically relates to items such as a user’s first name, surname, address, birthday, marital status, medical history, personal preferences and consumer behaviour. The data that is being collected should be anonomised to at least obscure any PII personally identifiable information. This is a legal requirement in Europe. You probably have cookies on your website for tracking for Google Analytics or Facebook already, amongst others. It is up to you to ensure that the data collected does not include PII. Google and Facebook should already be compliant, but which other tools are you using? Or contact forms etc.
Ultimately you are responsible for declaring in advance which cookies you use, and what you will do with any data collected, so it is recommended that you use the right tool or legal advice.
There are a few options in this minefield, so we are recommending one of these and preferably a Google CMP partner:
- Legal Firm – Talk to a solicitor and get a legal document for a fee, but feel all safe. Not much of your time involved, just some of your money. However this is probably not a dynamic document, therefore any change in the law can make this redundant. So, who will oversee any changes and make the requisite edits to your website policies. Ask your solicitor how this is handled. They may recommend one of these tools and set it up correctly for you.
- Termageddon – This is dynamic, they make the changes to your documents, as the laws change, to ensure that you are always compliant. Just get them to confirm that their policy docs are valid in Ireland and Europe Termageddon – Talk to Hans or Donata Skilrud. It is $99 a year. A little bit of time needed by your webmaster, maybe two hours, to configure and very little money annually, for a lot of peace of mind. This is the one we chose to go with and currently recommend for Charities or big websites that need to be nailed down in terms of compliance. And we are affiliated to Termageddon, so tell Hans we sent you.
- Termly – Basic level is free if you do not need to make more than 5 revisions a year. Otherwise it is €162 annually.
- Get Terms – This looks like $59.
- IUBENDA is $9 a month and very popular especially in Europe. A Google CMP partner.
- CookieBot – From zero for up to 10 subpages and $12 monthly for up to 500 pages. A Google CMP partner.
- Cookie First – From $9 monthly. A Google CMP partner.
- Complianz – From $359 a year for one website. A Google CMP partner.
- Consent Manager – From $21 monthly.
- Commanders Act – A Google partner with a Consent Management Platform (CMP) which is a software platform that helps website owners and organizations manage user consents regarding the collection and processing of their personal data
- Osano – Small sites free or otherwise $199 annually. A Google CMP partner.
Google keeps a full list of its current Google CMP partners HERE.
Remember we are not legal advisers or solicitors – yes that is a disclaimer. Talk to your own solicitor rather than a web design agency. Hope that helps somewhat.
GDPR
See our GDPR General Data Protection Regulation article here. This legislation will definitely affect your business, so it cannot be ignored. It involves so many aspects of identity protection that it is a quagmire of complications. If a customer or visitor wants to give you grief over their data protection, then they can make your life hell. But if you are seen to be compliant or complying, they will most likely pick on some other business. If there is a legal action, you want the court to see that you have, at least, attempted to be compliant. It is much like having an alarm or security sign on the wall of your home, usually burglars will move on to a house that does not have a security sign. You can expect to read about people making money by taking advantage of your lack of protection on your website. Most people seem to just hope that nothing goes wrong – fingers crossed.
