The Importance of Privacy Policies for Websites and Apps.

Here’s the typical scenario, you’ve been working 10–15 hours per day on making the next big hit tech platform. The night before you launch it, you’re worrying about spreading the word, fixing last minute bugs and then you hit your head against the wall because you realize that you don’t have a privacy policy.

Privacy policies are important for any web or mobile based platform. In fact, it’s required if you’re collecting personal information from your users. The idea is that if you’re collecting personal information about your customer such as a phone number, address, photos, address book etc. you have to inform your users. Think about it, wouldn’t it be creepy to keep all their data without them knowing? We probably wouldn’t want that to happen to us.

The popular mobile app Path, ended up receiving an $800,000 fine for not disclosing that they collected the contacts within their users address books. That’s an expensive fee that could have been avoided with a well crafted privacy policy that may have only costed them a few hundred bucks.

When you’re making an application or a website, make sure that you’re customers can find your privacy policy because you can’t hide it! Also, keep it entirely transparent so that it doesn’t come back to harm you in the future, if you’re going to collect information from your users, then disclose what it is that you’re going to be collecting. Finally, every policy should have accessible contact information for your business so that they can contact you with any questions regarding the information in the privacy policy.

Here’s what you shouldn’t do when you’re getting a privacy policy.

1. Don’t use a competitor’s privacy policy. The information within that privacy policy maybe copyrighted. Also, the information in their privacy policy may be totally unrelated to the information that’s relevant to your company.
2. Don’t use a random one that you find online, it may be totally irrelevant to what you’re application/website does. If you’re doing something unique, chances are a standard privacy policy won’t cut it because it will exclude important components that should be included.
3. Hire an expert. Although the last thing you probably want to do is shell out a few hundred bucks, it’s probably something that you should seriously consider. The last thing you want is to turn out like Path.