A Complete Beginner’s Guide To Creating A Privacy Policy

Do you need to create a privacy policy for your website? Use this complete beginner’s guide to creating a privacy policy to help you do it.

Now I don’t speak lawyer and I don’t speak computer, but the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) updates had me trying to figure out both.

It has taken me a moment to know what I need to do and if you have a blog or a site I am sure you have been wondering the same thing. Many of the big sites and service providers have done most of the heavy lifting for us, but then again, they were the ones doing most of the tracking.

GDPR? WordPress has your back.

This is a novice’s advice for creating and updating your privacy policy with a lot hand-holding from WordPress and also no techno/lawyer speak. Just plain English.

I have worked through the 12 Short Stories sites. At first, I thought there wasn’t a lot of tracking and data storing, but it seems that it takes quite a few cookies and whole bunch of trackers to run a website. Not malicious, just necessary.

This is driven by the EU and it’s easy to assume that it isn’t applicable to you, but it’s worldwide, and I think, ultimately a good thing. Also, I like knowing who is seeing what. It’s a good exercise.

Here is what I did:

Our site is hosted on WordPress and WordPress, the darlings that they are, have created a lovely template.

1. First you need to create or select a Privacy Policy page.
2. Go to your dashboard. Select settings. Select privacy.
3. Either create a new page or select the Privacy Policy page in WordPress.
4. On that page (the create or select page on WordPress) there is a link to their Guide. (Best page ever)
5. Work through the template and figure out what you have, what you need and what you can delete.
6. Do this by going to your plugins page, check if your plugins are compliant and grab the links to their privacy policies. This is the part that took the longest.
7. Publish your Privacy Policy.

The latest WordPress Update also allows you to import or export data for a specific user and allows you to delete user information, in keeping with ‘the right to be forgotten’.

You can also have your cookies checked out on CookieBot to check your compliance level.

That is where we are at the moment. It’s still very new to me and I’ll be adding and changing as necessary. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Good luck with your privacy policy.

Top Tip: If you want to learn how to blog, join us for The Complete Blogging Course in Johannesburg or sign up for the online version.

 by Mia Botha

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