5 Ways to Improve the Online Privacy Policy for Your Business

As the Internet has grown, so has concern for privacy. Many people shopping online are overly aware of some of the privacy breaches that they run into on a daily basis. When it comes down to it, any given website may embed what they call cookies into your temporary Internet history, so that your online viewing trends are monitored. The cookies are intended to give customers a more customized shopping experience online, but privacy advocates are vehemently against it. As the owner of an online only business, it can be important to be as transparent as possible in your privacy policy. Here are five ways to improve the online privacy policy for your business.

1. Make your business’ contact information very visible. Whether you offer a “click this link now” button or some other kind of call to action, you want to make it easy for customers to email, or even call, your business if they have any questions about the privacy policy. Many privacy policies are written and drafted by lawyers, so they can be a little confusing.
2. Only talk about your business – don’t talk about your industry. The more your privacy policy sounds like a plot for an entire industry to steal people’s personal information, the more someone is going to click off of your website and shop somewhere else. So, make sure to use your business’ name. If a customer is on your website, they want to be doing business with your company and your company only. The more you use broad terms to describe your industry, the less trustworthy you will seem.
3. If you do collect personal data, like an IP address, to provide customers with a more tailored shopping experience, you want to be able to access that information and remove it if you ever wanted to. If you really want to improve your privacy policy, you want to make it easier for customers to be in control of the data that is being collected and you want to give them the total power to destroy it if they don’t want your business to have it. While you won’t be personally looking at the private information, it can give people great comfort to know that they can have it expunged if they wanted to.
4. Give customers options. In today’s world of customization – just like you customize a shopper’s experience, you want to give the shopper some options too. This means that you want to explain very clearly in your privacy policy that customers can turn cookies off and on. This will make a particular customer a lot more comfortable shopping on your website.
5. Make your privacy policy very visible. Most businesses have their privacy policy at the very bottom, left hand corner of the website – in small, grey text. The only problem with this is that it takes a long time to find. So, if you want to improve your policy – just make it easier to find. Sometimes, a little transparency is all a customer needs to restore their trust.