Privacy Policy Template

6 min read

This Privacy Policy Template is covers the general privacy concerns and regulations. I hope you find it useful and a good starting point in compiling your own privacy policy for use on your own website or app. Feel free to add stuff that I haven’t added, and remove stuff that you don’t like. If there are ways that I can do things better, you should absolutely report issues or send me a pull request because I love them so much.

What is a Privacy Policy

A privacy policy is a description of what you do with personal data. The critical things to describe in the policy are how you and your website or app collect, use, store, and share or disclose information about people. Providing a privacy policy also helps your users understand what happens to information about them.

Note: A Privacy Policy is not the same as the Terms and Conditions agreement. A Terms and Conditions is the agreement where you include the rules and guidelines that users must agree to in order to use your website or app.

What is a Personal Data

Personal data is any kind of data or information that can be considered personal (identifies an individual):

First and last name
Email address
Billing and shipping address
Credit card information
And so on

When is required a Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy is required by law if you collect personal data. One should be provided where your website or app does anything with personal data. A Privacy Policy is required regardless of the type of platform your business operates on or what kind of industry you’re in:

Website
WordPress blog, or any other platform: Joomla, Drupal etc
E-commerce store
Mobile app: iOS, Android or Windows Phone
Facebook app
Desktop app
Digital product

What to include in Privacy Policy

What to include in a Privacy Policy depends on what personal information you collect, how you collect it and what you are doing with that collected information.

You’ll need to disclose if any third parties are involved collecting personal information in your name, i.e. you use MailChimp to collect email addresses to send weekly updates to your members.

A few examples:

The Collection of Routine Information section is the most important section of the entire description where you need to inform visitors/users what kind of personal information you collect and how you are using that information.
A Cookies disclosure should inform visitors/users that you may store cookies on their computers when they visit/play your website/app.
A Links to Third Party Websites is a very common disclosure added in a Privacy Policy informing visitors/users that your website/app may link to other websites outside your control or ownership, i.e. linking to a news website, and that visitors/users are advised to read the Privacy Policies of each website they visit.
A Security disclosure in the policy can give visitors/users assurance that their personal data is well protected, but no method that is 100% secure.

How this Privacy Policy Template works

This document has been drafted in Markdown (MD) and in plain text (TXT), and can be converted to HTML using a huge number of open source and commercially available tools.

Elements that need to be filled in have been marked up with double brackets, as follows:

                                [["website" or "app"]]
[["we" or "I"]]
[["us" or "me"]]
[["our" or "my"]]

                            

Make sure to find and fill in them all!

Disclaimer

You are free to use it on your own website or app. But before using this Privacy Policy Template you should be aware that you are responsible for its contents when published to your own website or app and that includes the accuracy of information.

This Privacy Policy Template is not legal advice, and is no substitute for a real live lawyer. Some places legally require that you have a privacy policy, and require that you describe certain things in it. Some places have (very specific) rules about what you are and aren’t allowed to do with info about users. You should definitely talk with a lawyer about all this stuff, and they should definitely read and review your policy.

You should also know that this Privacy Policy Template is provided without any warranty, express or implied, to the fullest extent possible.