How To Add A Privacy Policy In WordPress

In this article we will explain how to add a Privacy Policy in WordPress, a requirement for most sites.

Before we begin, we must make a disclaimer. We are not legal experts, nor our goal is to provide such advice. We just want to give you some guidelines to create these pages. However, you may want to consult your lawyer or legal team about the finer details.

Does My Site Need A Privacy Policy?

Privacy laws require you to have a Privacy Policy on your website if you collect personal information from your website visitors. All websites collect information about their visitors in different ways, including cookies.

In many countries (including the United States), websites are required by law to disclose the information they collect about their visitors, and how this information is used.

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect not long ago, and made some changes that affect just about every website owner. If your site visitors are mainly from the EU, you’ll need to be sure you comply with the GDPR’s rules.

The ways that WordPress websites collect personal information include through the following functions and features.
As we have explained before, even with the cookies we collect information, but there are many ways such as:

Allow comments: One way to encourage user interaction is to allow user comments. However, when a user leaves a comment, personal information is collected such as a name and an email address.
Google Analytics: If you use Google Analytics to monitor traffic and interactions with your website, is collecting personal information. Google Analytics uses IP addresses and cookies in order to analyze the traffic of your site, these are considered personal information according to the privacy laws.
Contact forms: If you request information such as your visitors’ email addresses in order to send them email newsletters, you are collecting personal information. This will activate the requirement of a Privacy Policy, and you should also obtain consent to contact them.
Google AdSense: Third-party advertising programs (such as Google AdSense) work by collecting behavioral information from their users, which is legally protected information.

Add A Privacy Policy Page In WordPress

WordPress itself comes with a basic Privacy Policy generator that you can use. WordPress makes it very easy to generate a privacy policy page for your website. It also provides you with a generic privacy policy template to use with instructions on how to add content.

First, visit Settings -> Privacy page. You’ll notice that WordPress has already created a Privacy Policy page draft for you.

Now you can:

• Click on the “Use this draft” button to save this page as your privacy policy.
• Click on the create new page button to generate a new Privacy Policy page. WordPress will automatically create a new page and open it for you to make changes.

If you are using the default draft, then you must to click on the Edit link to make changes and publish it.

If you look at the template that WordPress has provided, you will see a series of sections. This is a summary that lets you know what kind of information you need to explain to your visitors.

Some of the sections already have full text. This describes the data that all WordPress sites collect by default, as well as how much time is stored and similar details.

You may want to leave all this as it is. Anyway, it is worth reading to see if any of the functions have been modified.

Add Your Information

The basic requirements for a Privacy Policy are simple. You only need to list all the ways you collect or intend to collect user information on your website. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, here are some of the points you’ll need to make sure are covered in your WordPress Privacy Policy:

• Information you collect about users visiting your website (names, email addresses, payment details, etc).
• What features or elements of your site gather data (such as cookies and web beacons, contact forms, social media buttons, comments sections, etc).
• Why you collect this data and what the data is used for in a general sense.
• Include links to the privacy policy of each advertising program you participate in.
• All third-party advertisers collecting user information on your website like Google Adsense.
• How you protect the data, including what procedures are in place to keep it safe and to respond quickly in the event of a breach.
• How users can block cookies and opt-out of third party advertisements.
• What rights visitors have over their data. This should include the right to know all of the above, to ask for a copy of their data, and to request that it’s deleted at any time.
• Your contact information so that users can reach out if they have questions.

References:
wpbeginner.com
termsfeed.com
themeisle.com