Tag: Website Legal Compliance

Is your WordPress site compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any rules or regulations, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose services or products you are selling or promoting?

As the digital economy continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s vitally important that you try to stay informed about what’s going on and ensure that your site remains legally compliant, especially if having a digital presence plays an important part in your business strategy.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for profit, you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – BBB)

The new laws has legal consequences for various business categories, including:

• Any type of advertising, like Google AdSense
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketers
• Product Creation
• Blogging
• etc.

Without certain legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could close down your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will disapprove web applications, and you will not be allowed into a number of advertising or online merchant networks.

If your business online is not compliant, you could also face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

The purpose of this article is to make you aware that your website are required to comply with various legalities, the importance of being compliant with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be using on your website, and that there are solutions for WordPress that can help your site become fully compliant, such as the plugins that we list further below.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?

Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. As stated above, the aim of this article is to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies 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 providers whose services or products you promote

Why Making Your Website Compliant Is Important

Consider for one minute what the implications to your business would be if any of the following situations were to occur:

• A customer suffers a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness program.
• The skin cream you sell as an affiliate gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
• Your opt-in list displays a statement informing prospective subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you will do with their details.
• Someone copies your content and publishes it on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website or blog letting your visitors know that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re marketing that you could receive an affiliate commission if visitors buy it.
• You did not spell out the conditions of your refund/return policies.
• A visitor claims your testimonials are all fake and decides to sue you.
• You didn’t disclose that you received a free copy in a product review.
• Your site contains adult information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.

Consider now these real examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information (including credit card information to complete an offer they were promoting. In addition to a substantial $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to provide a copy of the judgement to everyone he does business with for the next 20 years — including employees.
• A social networking app developer received a whopping $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 does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. 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 picked at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had broken at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had infringed at least three 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 entirely to the Google program whose policies with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

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

Regardless of whether you are a:

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

It’s imperative to make sure that your website complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.

Compliance With 3rd-Party Services

Complying with third-party services terms and policies is important.

You are required to let your site users know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also required in most cases by most companies you interact with online.

For example:

Google requires your site to display certain information when using many of their services. This includes using services such as Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Monetizing your site using Google AdSense advertising …

(Google AdSense display advertising policy requirements)

Or promoting your services or products using Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell information products via companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you will be required to add a number of legal pages before they will approve your products for sale in their network …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank digital product vendors)

The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you add clear disclaimers and disclosures on your website, especially if you plan to sell or promote online using product testimonials or endorsements …

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Be Compliant

New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many business are still 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 companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any type of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. you should protect your business interests by making sure that your site complies with FTC regulations and guidelines.

You can find many sites that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the references and useful resources section at the end of this article for more information …

(It’s important to word your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)

Social Media Apps - Don’t Forget These

If you are planning to develop apps for your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others with access to your legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure as to whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote services or products on your site via affiliate marketing, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay advertising, or driving visitors to your site with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts suspended.
• If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a litigation magnet.

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

What Compliance Information Should You Add To Your Website To Be Legally Compliant?

If you suspect that your web site is lacking in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

Adding the following legal pages to your site will keep you out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and third-party service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Privacy Statement
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

As well as the above pages, you may want to consider adding any of the pages listed below where applicable:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides general financial information)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding correct disclosure information is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – Informs visitors that you are not being paid for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Informs your readers that you will be compensated if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate link.
• Review Or Sample Copy – Informs visitors that you have received a sample or review copy of the product by the author or product developer.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets your visitors know that you have been compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs visitors that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Website

Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once this has been done, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.

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

(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your server and upload pages using FTP)

You can then add links to these pages in WordPress using a custom WordPress menu …

(Custom WordPress Menu)

Make sure that your legal pages are kept up-to-date and clearly visible to all visitors. You can add links to your legal pages to the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your website) so that users can access legal information from every web page …

(Display links to your legal information on all of your site’s pages)

For a detailed tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar or footer in WordPress, refer to this tutorial:

• How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets In Your Sidebar

Templates

You can find downloadable attorney-drafted disclosures and forms and agreements by searching online, or visiting websites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-prepared legal forms)

Visit this website to learn more:

• FindLegalForms.com – Legal forms

Another option is to purchase a set of website legal templates drafted by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages)

These templates were created by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with simple search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your web pages.

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

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

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

For more information, go here:

• Website Legal Pages

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

In addition to using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your website is to use WordPress plugins.

Here are some WordPress plugins worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)

If you don’t want to spend time creating legal web pages manually, then consider choosing WordPress Legal Pages …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a very low-priced and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help make the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you a great deal of time.

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

• Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Editable Pages – Content editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WP page.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – Add shortcodes to any of your website or blog pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When a user agrees to the terms, the page unlocks.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your main dashboard menu section …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Legal Pages Menu)

This allows you to create, edit and view legal pages from your admin area …

(WP Legal Pages – Settings Area)

With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, affiliate sites, medical sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page Type)

Select from several pre-configured legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Built-In Legal 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

To learn more this plugin, visit the plugin site:

• WordPress Legal Pages

Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over 20 customizable compliance templates for your online presence …

Go here to learn more about the plugin:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin

Legal Suite Pro

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin 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 And Conditions
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro Plugin – 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered 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 the plugin on all of your websites.

To learn more, visit this site:

• Legal Suite Pro

If using the services of lawyers to create your online legal documentation is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some type of basic legal protection on your website until you can afford legal services.

We want your site to be protected!

Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal forms, or plugins as described in the section below.

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator allows you to quickly generate necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.

***

As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online and the terms of service and guidelines of third-party services and products that you may be promoting or recommending online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumer rights, 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, please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website fully complies with the law concerning your specific business.

References And Legal Resources

Below is a useful list of additional sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your website may require to remain compliant and meet legal obligations:

• FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
• Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
• FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
• 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

See Also …

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

We hope you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly add essential legal pages to your site using inexpensive solutions.

***