Data Privacy Day is January 28!
This means it’s time to discuss everyone’s favorite topic: Privacy!
The reality is, most people want a reasonable right to their privacy, but as business owners, it can be intimidating to determine how to respect the privacy of our website visitors. Data Privacy Day was created by the International Association of Privacy Professionals as a way to not only raise awareness of the importance of people’s privacy rights, but also offer insights to businesses on how to respect those privacy rights by complying with applicable privacy laws.
This year is particularly important as three new privacy laws are going into effect in 2024 that could impact your business/website. So let’s quickly go over the good, the bad, and the scary (not in that order) when it comes to data privacy.
The bad (Privacy can be confusing)
Data Privacy can be confusing. What even is it?
In short, data privacy refers to people’s right to control their personal information online. Things like emails, names, phone numbers, addresses, and even IP addresses are all examples of data that belongs to the individual.
Personal information is regulated by privacy laws, so we as business owners need to identify whose personal information our website collects, as that will help us determine what privacy laws apply to us. From there, we can determine what we need to to comply with laws (such as having a proper Privacy Policy in place providing the required disclosures under each applicable law). As business owners, we need to ensure our websites A) demonstrate our respective for our website visitors’ privacy rights and B) don’t put our business’s at risk of privacy related fines or lawsuits.
The scary (penalties exist)
Privacy related fines and lawsuits are on the rise. For GDPR alone, Statista found that the amount of money businesses were fined in 2023 was equal to the amount of fines given out in 2020, 2021, and 2022 combined.
And it’s not just GDPR. More and more privacy laws are passing throughout the world giving people privacy rights. In fact, three more privacy laws are already scheduled to go into effect later this year (with three more laws in 2025). If these laws apply to your business, you will be required by law to add certain disclosures to your Privacy Policy.
The good (there’s a solution)
We are happy to let you know that we partnered up with Termageddon to provide an extension to all MainWP customers to help respect (and comply with) their website visitors’ privacy rights. Termageddon is an attorney-founded tech solution that helps you not only generate comprehensive policies for your website, but they also push new disclosures to your policy pages whenever new applicable laws pass! Each MainWP customer gets a complimentary license (aka a set of policies to protect one website) and the ability to purchase (and/or resell) more licenses if policies are needed for additional websites. You can even share license access with your attorney or other colleagues who can customize the policies to their liking!
Visit the Termageddon extension page to learn more about how you can set up the integration as well as how to receive the complimentary Termageddon license for auto-updating website policies.
Happy Data Privacy Day!
When it comes down to it, we all deserve privacy rights. And we as business owners have an opportunity to respect these privacy rights. Hopefully, you found this helpful, and we hope you have a very happy Data Privacy Day!
