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Short answer to the question
Any of the current solutions to the Privacy Policy / TOS problem make you waste money and time. I've experienced this problem myself and decided to solve this hell of hassle once and for all, creating a privacy policy generator that is really compliant, with a company making money behind (and this grants quality), built to speak web designers' language (not lawyers' one), allowing to generate a fully-customized high-quality privacy policy within 3 minutes, by pressing a few buttons.
Here's the website: http://www.iubenda.com
I'm the founder.
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# Small intro
As a web designer I've always faced this problem myself, that terrible hassle of getting rid of the privacy policy. Two years ago I told myself: why the hell nobody solves this problem once and for all?
So, I started working on iubenda (http://www.iubenda.com), with the goal of giving any website owner in the world a way to generate a Privacy Policy without having to read a single legalese word.
After a whole year of thinking, another year of cust dev, a seed round and even the awesome Seedcamp experience, we are here to conquer the footer of every website in the world :P
To date we have 2k people waiting to try out the product, we're approaching 1M pageviews served by our privacy policy icon, we have 100 beta testers and we're able to generate a privacy policy both in English and Italian languages.
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# Why every solution mentioned is a mess (most of the times)
If you have to spend money and time on that boring document that nobody reads (aka privacy policy), the best you can hope is that the money is actually well spent.
The tough truth? Most of the times it's not, and I'll explain why.
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## What are Privacy Policies about?
A Privacy Policy must inform the users visiting a website about the personal data collected, the use of those data, the parties involved (first and third parties) and few other minimal things.
The problem here is that every website is slightly different, different because is using different services collecting different data. Any web designer can get it, on some websites you put Google Analytics, on some others Google Analytics and Google Adsense, sometimes you use Mailchimp to manage a mailing list, and so on.
Now, the problem is that most of the privacy policies I read don't mention these services, making the privacy policy completely useless.
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## So, you're basically telling me that I payed $1k for my privacy policy, and IT IS USELESS?
Yeah dude, the privacy policy can't be general, it must be specific, or it's just like not having a privacy policy at all.
Of course you can fall into this hole while copy/pasting, while paying for a lawyer or while using a low-quality generator. Sometimes you may of course find a good lawyer or a good web company (like TRUSTe), but that kind of lawyer/service is usually expensive.
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## Not every lawyer writes wrong privacy policies: here's a simple way to check yours
Try to ask your lawyer what a "cookie" actually is.
Most will start talking about chocolate biscuits.
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## So, what?
Since the world is never white or black, the Privacy Policy World is not about having or not having a privacy policy, there's a gray area in the middle: having a privacy policy that sucks. Sad but true, this is the most common situation.
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# Carrot after the stick
After analyzing this situation and getting to the conclusion above (privacy policies are expensive, and they even suck), I simply started working on a solution, and here I tell you what I did.
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## Rethinking the Privacy Policy from scratch
The Privacy Policy model had to be rebuilt from scratch. The current model was a lawyer's parturition, but the only thing that lawyers are able to build is boring documents that nobody ever read. How can you accept such a state of things?
So I studied the law to extract the naked privacy requirements: personal data collected, use of those data, parties involved (first and third parties).
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## Personal data
The personal data collected depend on the services used on the website, such as Google Analytics or Google Adsense. Other ways to collect data are the mailing list, the registration form, the comment system. All these uses are standardized, they're the same on every website.
Since the web design world is moving fast to SaaS services, outsourcing most of the personal data collection, the standardization is even increasing.
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## Use of the data
Another requirement for the Privacy Policy is the data collection purpose, but if the world is made of websites using standardized services, the purpose corresponds to the purpose of those services, like "analytics" or "advertising".
Another point is gone.
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## Parties involved
The website itself will always be an involved party, but what about the others?
Wait, those SaaS services have a company behind, and that company is that third party we are looking for (such as Google for Google Analytics). Bingo!
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## We have the ingredients, now the recipe
The next step was to put this all into a simple UI, allowing to generate a Privacy Policy with all the complexity hidden behind.
The good news is that we made it.
The model required a database made of privacy policy pieces referring to the standardized services (Google Analytics, etc), with some room for customization too (e.g. Registration forms don't always ask the same information).
These pieces had to be assembled like a puzzle, and that's the reason why software exists.
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## Who's more clever than me?
Ok, I'm kidding. The truth is that the process is simple, very simple, but quite powerful. And it generates beautiful privacy policies with nearly no effort. Completely awesome.
FYI, my cat on the keyboard says: "'0ììp"
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# SO WHAT?!
Ehm, I spent a whole hour writing this comment, you spent a few minutes of your valuable time to read.
Since our motto is "conquering the footer of every website in the world", I feel more or less like Brain from "Pinky and the Brain":
- What are we going to do tonight, Brain?
- The same thing we do every night, Pinky... Try and take over the world!
If you're interested in solving once and for all that hell of hassle of writing a privacy policy (w/ TOS coming soon), be sure to try out our product:
http://www.iubenda.com
(we're in private beta, but out moving fast)
Ah, of course we rely on a strong legal cofounder ;)