Privacy Policies For Websites
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How willing are you to buy online? If you're skeptical, you can't expect your customers to feel any differently. Before they'll transact, customers need to feel safe. Part of that safe feeling is the knowledge that their privacy is respected, which is why Internet privacy policies are so important. Research shows that consumers are more likely to complete online transactions if they know beforehand how their personal information is going to be used. In fact, legislation in several Countries and US States now require online businesses to disclose their privacy policies before customers are asked to register any details. What is a privacy policy? On the Internet, privacy is not the same thing as security. Technology dictates how information is kept secure over the Net, but all it takes to respect your customers' privacy over the Internet is honesty. Your online business should have a privacy policy openly accessible from the home page. It should fully disclose the ways you intend to use any personal data you collect from your customers. For example: names, email addresses, consumer preferences, etc. Internet browsing software has allowed individuals to set their 'privacy preferences' for some time now. These privacy preferences are automatically compared against the privacy policies of visited Web sites. In order to allow this, the Web site needs to have a special 'machine readable' file in place which is read by the browsing software. Until recently, the absence of this 'machine readable' file meant very little. However, the increasing privacy concerns of Internet surfers has prompted the introduction of new default privacy preferences in Internet browsing software. These new preferences will automatically block parts of a Web site if the special 'machine readable' privacy policy of the Web site is missing. Internet Explorer will display a small eye with a red bar when some part of a Web site has been blocked due to the absence of a compliant privacy policy.  Why have a privacy policy? Polls show that almost half of all online shoppers are more nervous about how their personal data is being used than they are about the security of their credit card transactions. People who have never bought online are even more scared of privacy violations. The absence of a 'machine readable' policy on your Web site, may cause parts of your Web site to be automatically blocked by Internet browsing software. The bottom line: You can increase online sales, boost confidence in your company, and reduce the chances of receiving false customer information if you prominently display a privacy statement on your Web site and include a compliant 'machine readable' privacy policy. |
Even if your Web site does not collect any information about your visitors,
the absence of a compliant privacy policy may block access to parts of your Web site.
Online P3P Policy Editor
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P3PWiz is an easy to use p3p editor, p3p generator, and p3p privacy statement tool to generate policies that support the W3C Recommendation to create P3P policies. It is a internet privacy statement generator with a simple to use wizard interface that will quickly and easily create W3C compliant p3p policies that allow cookies to be set in internet explorer 6 and other browsers Full instructions and installation are included. If you need a few tips you may want to consult the P3P Guiding Principles Document for resources and helpful hints.
P3PWiz generates P3P Policies and
Compact Policies for websites. A p3p policy wizard will create a policy generator or a policy editor. A wizard can also be a p3p generator for w3c P3P security. To store cookies in ie6, internet explorer 6, a privacy policy needs to state cookies preferences in the policy settings using a p3p privacy statement. A Privacy Report is created using a p3p editor or generator or wizard for security. For ie6 privacy (also known as the internet explorer 6 privacy report) using a p3p privacy policy, will use this policy editor or p3p Wizard to generate the p3p 'well known location' 'machine readable' XML files. P3PWiz policy generator wizard, is created by Internet Dynamics At this point, you should decide what policies apply to what pages on the site. Many companies have more than one P3P policy depending on how many different data collection techniques and purposes for different pages. This way, a user will know exactly how their data will be used for a given page or form. Of course, a user can always reference the written policy to see the overall practices of the site, but specifying practices for certain directories or pages often will make browsing more seamless for the average user. Many company's websites are made up of several different pieces, each of which may collect information differently, or not at all. Each different section will likely have a privacy policy that is slightly different from the policies of other parts of your site. When creating your P3P policy, you can choose to have one general P3P policy that attempts to describe all of the various data collecting components of your site. However, constructing multiple P3P policies, one for each part of your site where you have different policies or you collect vastly different kinds of information, will make your overall privacy policy easier to understand for both you and your customers. You should realize that your human-readable policy will still be available to users so you will still have the opportunity to present an overall policy for site. When preparing to create your machine-readable P3P policy file, you must understand how many different privacy policies are in effect on your site and under what conditions each applies. P3P policies, like their human-readable counterparts, can apply to a single directory or file, or to all files and directories except one or more that you specify. Additionally, you can differentiate between policies for a single page or group of pages based on what operations are being performed (e.g. PUT, DELETE, GET). The P3P 1.0 Specification describes the privacy policies of an example company, CatalogExample. This company applies one policy to those users who simply browse their site and another to those who purchase products. From the "browse" group, CatalogExample collects information about their computer and what pages they visit. This information is used by the company and their agents for administrative purposes "to improve our site." Those users who purchase products from CatalogExample must give them more detailed data (e.g. name, address, financial information). This information is used to complete the purchase and ship the product. The user has the option to store information for later reuse and has access to his/her information to make updates and corrections. The two distinct data collection procedures and their unique applications convinced CatalogExample that they should use at least two P3P policies.
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