Is your website legal? 😬 (How to create a compliant Privacy Policy!)

Summary

Creating a website involves more than just design and marketing; it's crucial to ensure compliance with data privacy laws through proper privacy and cookie policies. Many might find the legal side daunting, but tools like Ubenden simplify this process, enabling website owners to create tailored, compliant policies easily. It's essential for all types of websites, from small freelancers to large e-commerce platforms, to inform users how their data is used, collected, and the rights they have over their information.

Highlights

• Anna discusses the oft-overlooked legal aspects of web design, emphasizing the necessity of compliance with data privacy laws. ⚖️
• A disclaimer to seek professional legal advice—Anna shares her tips from a designer's perspective. 🚨
• Anna explains the necessity for privacy policies, regardless of a business's size. Size doesn't exempt you! 🧑‍💻
• Details on what needs to be included in privacy policies to be compliant, from data collection to user rights. 🔍
• A walkthrough of using Ubender, a tool that simplifies making compliant privacy and cookie policies. 💻
• Importance of having a cookie solution on your site, making usage clear to users. 🍪
• Step-by-step guide on setting up Ubender, from generating policies to embedding them on your site. 🛠️
• Anna stresses the importance of embedding a compliant code snippet on your site to ensure legal compliance. 🖥️

Key Takeaways

• Always consult a legal expert for specific legal advice as non-compliance can be risky! 🎓
• Even small websites require privacy and cookie policies—don't underestimate their importance! 📑
• Ubender is a recommended tool that simplifies creating compliant privacy and cookie policies. 🎉
• Did you know your privacy policy needs your business address and contact details? Essential for legality! 🏢
• Embedding compliant policies and cookie solutions on your website is crucial—don't skip this step! 🔄

Overview

Anna dives into the often neglected legal world of website design, specifically focusing on the critical aspect of being compliant with data privacy laws. She outlines the importance of having a privacy and cookie policy, not just for large corporations but also for small businesses and freelancers. This is crucial for ensuring users are informed about how their data is collected and stored, and for protecting one's business legally.

Even though these legal requirements might seem daunting, Anna introduces Ubender, a user-friendly tool that simplifies the creation of privacy and cookie policies. She offers a detailed walkthrough of its setup process, highlighting how it helps website owners stay compliant effortlessly. Designed to cater to websites with different amounts of traffic, Ubender offers flexibility and peace of mind to users.

The video is packed with essential insights, from making viewers aware of legal disclaimers to sharing intuitive steps for generating and embedding policies using Ubender. Anna's guidance is invaluable for anyone looking to legally safeguard their online presence with proper privacy and cookie policies, underscoring the importance of this often overlooked aspect of website management.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Importance of Privacy Policy This chapter introduces the topic of privacy policies in website design. It highlights the importance of complying with data privacy laws when taking businesses online. Despite being perceived as dull, having a privacy policy is essential for running a business legally. The chapter also mentions a solution that facilitates the creation of a tailored privacy and cookie policy, ensuring compliance and ease of implementation on websites.
• 01:00 - 02:00: What is a Privacy or Cookie Policy? The chapter introduces the host, Anna, a designer and online educator at biozanna.co.uk, who shares content on business, marketing, productivity, and tutorials. She requests viewers to subscribe and like her content. Anna starts with a disclaimer that she is not a privacy or legal expert, setting the stage for the content to follow on privacy or cookie policies.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Legal Obligations and Small Business Considerations The chapter titled 'Legal Obligations and Small Business Considerations' discusses the importance of consulting a lawyer for professional legal advice when setting up a website to ensure compliance with all legal requirements. Although the speaker is a website designer not a legal professional, the chapter provides insights from their perspective. One focal area of discussion is the necessity of a privacy or cookie policy, which is described as an extensive document outlining how user data is handled.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Details Required in a Privacy and Cookie Policy This chapter discusses the importance of having a Privacy and Cookie Policy on websites. It covers how businesses and websites use data analytics to track traffic, manage e-commerce transactions, collect email addresses, and run advertising campaigns. The chapter stresses the responsibility of businesses to inform users about data storage and usage.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Using UBender for Easy Compliance The chapter discusses the importance of data privacy compliance, particularly emphasizing the variations in laws across the UK, US, and EU. It highlights the necessity of informing users about how their personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses, is being handled. The chapter strongly recommends consulting with a lawyer to address specific legal concerns.
• 05:00 - 06:00: How to Set Up UBender on Your Website In the chapter 'How to Set Up UBender on Your Website', the discussion begins with a focus on the importance of privacy policies and cookies policies even for small businesses and freelancers with simple websites. There is a misconception that these policies are unnecessary if the website is not collecting emails or selling products, but the reality is that most website platforms require compliance with privacy regulations regardless of the scale of operations.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Privacy Policy Setup on UBender This chapter discusses the necessity of having a privacy policy when using a website builder platform like Squarespace, which stores certain data about users. It highlights that features such as built-in analytics or a contact form on your website make a privacy policy essential.
• 07:00 - 08:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts The chapter emphasizes the importance of having a privacy policy, even for websites with simple functionalities like an email inquiry form. It highlights that any data capture—whether through a contact form or client emails stored in a project management system—necessitates a privacy policy. This requirement is essential for ensuring legal compliance as data is being stored and managed, demonstrating the broader applicability of privacy policies beyond just website interactions. The chapter concludes with a reminder that privacy policies are vital for protecting both the business and the client's information, regardless of how data is collected or stored.

Is your website legal? 😬 (How to create a compliant Privacy Policy!) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 today i wanted to talk about the really boring side of website design the legal side and making sure that when we are creating websites and taking our businesses online we are actually being compliant with data privacy laws and stuff like that and yeah it's a bit dull but if you want to make sure you're running your business legally you need to have one but luckily i've got a solution that makes it really really easy to create a tailored privacy and cookie policy which means that you're actually compliant and it's super easy to add to your website as well
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] hi if you're new here my name is anna i am a designer and online educator at biozanna dot co dot uk and here on youtube i share videos about business marketing productivity tutorials all that kind of stuff so if you like that type of content please remember to hit the subscribe button and give this video a thumbs up while you're there now before we get started i do want to say um a disclaimer quickly that i am not a
• 01:00 - 01:30 lawyer if you want actual uh professional advice about legally setting up your website and making sure that you're compliant on everything definitely speak to an actual solicitor or lawyer who is a specialist in this kind of stuff i just want to share with you my knowledge and tips from the perspective of a website designer as these are the kind of recommendations that i have to suggest or advise my clients on as well so first of all what is a privacy or a cookie policy it's basically a long page or a
• 01:30 - 02:00 document that you will have on your website which explains to people how you're using their data because when we have websites we'll be doing things like tracking analytics to work out how much traffic you've got on your website doing things like that we might even be doing more complicated stuff like selling things through e-commerce collecting email addresses running advertising campaigns that track where people have been on your website all of those things require you as a business or the software that you're using to store data about a user
• 02:00 - 02:30 it might just be that they have landed on a page on your website or it might be more detailed information like their email address their phone number their address if they're buying for your online store so it can be really complex and thanks to data privacy laws at least here in the uk and in the us and in the eu and they are all a bit different so again that's why i would suggest talking to a lawyer if you are worried about something specific from where you are but because of these laws we have to be really careful in letting our users know exactly how their
• 02:30 - 03:00 data is being used and stored and all that other stuff but i'll talk about that quickly in a second now you might not think if you are just a very small business maybe you've just got started maybe you're just a freelancer and you've got a very simple basic website you maybe you're not collecting email addresses maybe you're not actually selling any products online you might think that you don't have to have a privacy policy or a cookies policy and it's not relevant to you but unfortunately you're probably wrong because most website platforms or
• 03:00 - 03:30 builders that you might have built your website on do actually store certain bits of data about the users of your website you might not be aware of that but generally if your website platform has something like the ability for you to see analytics about your website so squarespace for example has a built-in analytics um tool where you can see how many visitors you've had you can see what pages they've been on things like that if your website builder has anything like that you need a privacy policy if you have a contact form on your website even just a
• 03:30 - 04:00 simple one that just sends um the inquiry to your email address for example you still need a privacy policy because you are capturing data from someone on your website and you're storing it in a certain way and even if you don't have a contact form but maybe you are a service provider and you have clients email you and you have a kind of project management system where you store information about your clients or when they're working with you you need a privacy policy because even though it's not done on your website you still are
• 04:00 - 04:30 storing people's data in a certain way you need to make them aware of that when you are being in contact with them so to be on the safe side i usually just like to assume that anyone who has a website needs a privacy policy and a cookies policy now there are certain things that have to be in this in order to be compliant it's not just enough to kind of write out your own policy with saying that you use this tool and this tool it's not quite as simple as that there are certain check boxes that you do have to fill out and again i'd encourage you to do your own research if you are planning
• 04:30 - 05:00 to write your own or come up with your own but you need to include things like what data you collect and for what purposes how you're going to store that data and process that data you also need to make it really clear about the user's rights to withdraw their consent to you using their data and they should also know that they can request all the data that you hold on them uh by contacting you and so another little legal thing that you may not know is that in your privacy policy and your cookie policy which should be
• 05:00 - 05:30 clear on your website you do actually need to include your contact details so not just your email address but also your business name and your registered address as well and that's something that a lot of sole traders and freelancers don't realize but that on your privacy policy which should be on your website you do really need to be putting your registered business address to be legally compliant sorry however if this all sounds too complicated luckily there is a tool that i can recommend which makes this super super easy it's called ubender it's around 29
• 05:30 - 06:00 per year and that does depend on how much website traffic you have but if you're under 25 000 views per month then this solution is literally 29 a year which is like barely anything per month and definitely worth it to make sure that you're compliant and i just want to show you how really quick and easy it is to get set up with it okay so i'm just on my website here where i have installed my privacy and cookies policies from ubender and so i just wanted to show you what it looks like really this is all just
• 06:00 - 06:30 embedded onto my website i haven't written any of this i've just clicked buttons when i was setting it up and they basically did the rest which is amazing and i just had to install it on my website so i just want to show you quickly um the ubender setup process so you go onto the website and i will leave the link in the description i'm not sponsored to make this video but i do have an affiliate link which means that if you sign up through my link i do get a bit of a kickback but as i say i use this myself and i
• 06:30 - 07:00 recommend it for all my clients because it is just so easy so um you can choose from the different plans i would probably suggest you would just need the personal plan and then it can go up in price depending on how many page views a month you have but just click to get started with that um and then once you're signing up what it will do is ask you for your website link so i'm just going to copy a link to this website and click start generating so that i can show you
• 07:00 - 07:30 so now it's asking do i want to generate a privacy and cookie policy do i want to generate the cookie solution so what i mean by a cookie solution is that little cookies pop-up that you get on some websites and again you need to have this on your website in order to be compliant so that users of your website can actually choose whether yes they're happy for you to be using cookies on your website or no they're not and they can click reject here now this is an example of a fully compliant cookie policy because it is set up with
• 07:30 - 08:00 ubender the accept and reject buttons are exactly the same so that people aren't you know almost forced to click the accept button they can also click to learn more and customize their cookie settings which you can't often do with kind of the built-in cookies pop-ups that you get in like squarespace or wix and stuff like that they're actually technically not fully compliant so that's why i would again recommend getting this a tool because it does this all for you and make sure it's compliant
• 08:00 - 08:30 so if you want this pop-up solution as well you just need to click generate on that and it will give you some code to embed onto your website but it's very very easy to do and they do actually give you instructions on how to do that as well so if i click generate now on the privacy and cookie policy what it will now do is there's some instruction guides here as well that you can follow through and to set this up properly but what you now need to do is add your services so you need to basically add all the different tools and software that you
• 08:30 - 09:00 use with your website and in your business that store people's data so for example i'm going to add service and search for squarespace you can also have it scan your website so that you can auto detect services and it takes a minute to do that so i'm not going to show you there you can basically search for your website platform click for that and choose what personal data you actually collect from people so for example if you just had a contact form you might just fill in like the first name and
• 09:00 - 09:30 email address and any information you collect from your contact form but if you for example were selling products on your website as well you would want to also include all of the other data that you collect with that e-commerce system so for example their purchase history maybe you collect their phone number as well and so you just need to select all of the personal information that you collect i'm just going to select that also for example if you use a project management system you can search for it in here
• 09:30 - 10:00 like trello for example i'm going to select that and then include again all the data that i have on people that i store within trello and it does take a few minutes to set up but it's better to be safe than sorry so just include everything that you might possibly use so maybe you use google drive as well or google analytics you can select all of those you can also search through all of these categories here on the left hand side just to see if you've missed any and scroll through and see if there are any
• 10:00 - 10:30 tools or software that you're using on there as well then you can just click save and close and then when you go to next it will give you the code and you need to fill in all of your company details but it will basically give you a snippet of code that you can then embed on your website and you can do this really easily no matter what website builder you're using and they give you instructions on how to do it so as i say if you are worried about making sure that your website is compliant this is literally the easiest tool to make sure that your website is actually
• 10:30 - 11:00 legal and i will leave the link to it below if you want to find out more information and get signed up thanks so much for watching i'll be back again next week with another video [Music] you