Tag: Privacy Statement

If you do any kind of business online, the last thing you want is to learn the hard way that you have broken the law.

Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes products or services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.

New laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for commercial gain, you must follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the US-based Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)

These laws has legal consequences for several online business categories, including:

• Any type of advertising, e.g. contextual ads
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creators
• Bloggers
• etc.

Without certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will reject web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote many advertising and affiliate merchant networks.

In addition, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.

This article explains why it’s important to have a legally compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. As stated above, this article is designed only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws that govern online business practices and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of 3rd-party companies whose products or services you promote

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Is your business at risk? Consider for one minute what the implications to your business would be if the scenarios below were to happen:

• A customer suffers a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online fitness workout.
• The skin cream you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone an adverse reaction.
• Your opt-in list provides a statement letting subscribers know that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t spelled out exactly what you will do with the details you’ve collected.
• Someone copies content from your website and puts it up on their own website.
• There is no statement on your site letting your site visitors know that you are endorsing a product as an affiliate and may get paid a commission if they buy it.
• You have not spelled out the terms and conditions of your refund and return policies.
• Online visitors claim that the testimonials on your site are fake and decide to sue you as a result.
• You haven’t disclosed that you were given a free copy in your product review.
• Your website contains adult content and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underage persons.

Consider now these documented case studies of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a hefty $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to issue everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
• A social networking app developer received a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
• Facebook’s Terms Of Service prohibits users from scraping UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
• An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken at least 3 of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued with warnings or lose access to the Google program whose policies with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk being exposed to litigation through non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Promoter
• AdSense Publisher
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• e-Commerce Store Owner
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Online Seller Of Any Product Or Service

You need to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website complies with all laws and regulations governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.

Complying With Third-Party Services Terms And Policies

Leading online companies and government regulatory agencies emphasize the importance of complying with the terms and policies of 3rd-party service providers.

You must let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also a requirement of many companies you will engage with.

For example:

Google requires your site to display certain information when using their products and features. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Generating revenue with your blogs with Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense advertising policy requirements)

And even promoting your services via Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell information-based products using merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add various legal pages to your website before your products are approved for sale in their network …

(ClickBank – policy requirements for product vendors)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially when concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …

(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many sites are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As documented on their website, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute website owners for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by making sure that your website is compliant with all FTC regulations.

Various business resource sites provide guidelines for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. See the additional resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(Word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you plan to create social networking applications for your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others with access to various legal pages …

(Apps for social networks also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote products or services on your site as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or using Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to include on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts terminated.
• If you’ve been wondering whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies)

Basic Legal Pages To Include In Your Website

If you suspect that your website or blog is falling short in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should keep you out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and external service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

• About Us
• Contact Page
• Privacy Policy
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimer Pages
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

As well as the above pages, you may want to look into including any of these pages:

• Affiliate Agreement (if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (if your website provides health or medical information)
• Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
• Media Terms Of Use (if you allow users to download media on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

Adding the correct type of disclosure to your site is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Lets your visitors be aware that you are not receiving any type of compensation for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors be aware that you will benefit financially if they purchase through your affiliate links.
• Review/Sample Copy – Informs your readers that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or developer.
• Sponsored Post – Informs users that you have been compensated in some form to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Lets visitors know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Website

Ideally, you should consult your lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to include them in your website.

Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually

If someone prepares the legal content for you in typical web page formatting (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legals directory on your web server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your server using FTP)

You can then add a link to these legal pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site

After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly visible to all site visitors. You can add these to your sidebar menu (or the footer of your website or blog) so that visitors can access the information from all pages …

(It’s important to display links to your legal information to users on all of your website’s pages)

For a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your WP sidebar, see this tutorial:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To The Website

Legal Templates

You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and internet forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to sites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(Find Legal Forms)

Go here to learn more:

• FindLegalForms.com

Alternatively, you can download a package of legal templates designed by attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)

Cut & Paste website legal templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your web pages.

The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Form Templates include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects new Federal Trade Commission guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.

You can either create a new WordPress page for every legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as previously described.

Go here for more details:

• Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

As well as using templates, another option is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If the idea of setting up legal pages manually seems too time-consuming for you, then consider using a plugin like WordPress Legal Pages instead …

WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s an affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you time.

Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages plugin are:

• Built-in Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of your basic legal pages in a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easily editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit legal pages just like every other page on your site.
• Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
• Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other WP page.
• Forced Options – Force page lock down. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when the user agrees to your terms.
• Additional Features – More features are being added to this plugin with every new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will appear inside your main WP dashboard menu section …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

This lets you create, edit and view legal pages from the admin area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Screen)

The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, affiliate sites, Amazon sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Page Type)

Select from a number of built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Pre-configured Templates)

Legal page templates include:

• Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
• Linking Policy
• External Links Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Refund Policy
• Affiliate Disclosure
• Privacy Policy
• Affiliate Agreement
• Facebook Privacy Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• Antispam Policy
• DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
• Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclosure Statement Template
• Medical Disclaimer Template
• Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
• Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
• DMCA Policy Template
• California Privacy Rights Policy Template
• Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
• COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
• Blog Comments Policy Template
• Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
• FTC Disclaimer Widget

Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this useful plugin:

• WP Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

total website compliance & disclaimer solution …

Learn more here:

• Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress)

This plugin lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance
• Privacy Policy
• Social Media Disclosure
• Medical Disclaimer
• Terms of Service
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)

Additionally:

• Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
• Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.

With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.

The plugin developers have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your sites (even sites that you decide to sell).

More information:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If hiring legal experts to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, then at least consider implementing some basic type of legal protection on your website until you can afford a lawyer.

We want your business to be safe!

Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal page templates, or a WordPress plugin - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to easily generate necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

***

As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do any kind of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies and any guidelines and terms of service (TOS) for third-party services and products that you may be promoting or recommending online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.

Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?

Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements regarding your specific business.

Resources

Below is a time-saving list of sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
• Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
• Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
• CAN-SPAM Act Guide
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
• FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
• FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
• The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
• FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
• FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
• US Patent and Trademark Office
• United States Copyright Office

Also …

• Google Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
• Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
• AdSense Help – Required Content
• Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
• AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
• ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
• Facebook Platform Policies

We hope this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site using simple methods and solutions.

***