Every website should include several legal components, and one of these is a privacy policy. Especially if you collect personal or private financial data, sending your clients a privacy policy once a year is a matter of law.
If you collect personal information on your website, you should have a privacy policy. You collect personal information on your website if you have:
• A contact form on your contact us page
• A Constant Contact or other list management opt-in
• Web code that enables cookies – I don’t think our core sites use cookies, but if you run ads, you make be using pixels which use cookies
• An appointment request button
• Any other add-on that includes form fields to be filled out
Since I am a CPA, I am not licensed to give legal advice, so I cannot include any type of legal template for you. But I can tell you how I wrote my own privacy policy so you can either do the same or hire an attorney to provide one for you.
First I visited large company sites and viewed their privacy policies to get an outline of what should be in mine. This gave me samples to view. To do this, just google any company and scroll to their footer. There is almost always a link to a privacy policy in a website’s home page footer.
Second I listed all the ways we use client information on our sites.
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Once, I did that, I had enough to create my policy. You should get an attorney to review anything you write that has legal ramifications.
There are also a couple of sites that generate privacy policies for you. You can google “privacy policy” to find them, and please note I am not recommending this one way or the other.
What I am recommending is that you create a privacy policy for your business and post it to your website. If you have yours, forward it to us, and we’ll get it added.