Do you really need a privacy policy on website?

[mugatea]

As far as I know if you have a website you need a privacy & cookie policy to inform visitors (at least in EU). But I never see them on any sites except the bigger sites, most sites never have them. So does it really matter? Does Google care? Does anyone care?

 

[Ian Sutherland]

I think it depends on what you and your website do. Our company deals with other companies' data, including personal data, so a privacy statement is really important, and we have a link to it on the bottom of our home page: http://www.yourofficeanywhere.co.uk/privacy/

I couldn't tell you whether Google cares or not, but with new GDPR regulations coming in to force soon your customers may care.

 

[Paul Murray]

If you collect any information about visitors (name, emails address, etc) then you should have a policy telling them what you collect, how you use it and how they can remove this information from your database. Even if it's a newsletter sign up through a third party such as MailChimp, you should still have a policy of your own.

You likely don't see them on smaller sites because either the business, or their designer/developer didn't bother to create/understand they need a policy.

As for a cookie policy, they're pointless but the EU says we need them so you should have one. Chances are your site is using cookies and you didn't even know it, especially if you use something like Google fonts.

The ICO keeps changing it's mind about whether we need to use an (annoying) banner to inform people about them or not, but I tend to use one just in case.

 

[Peter Bowen]

A few years ago Google suspended advertising (AdWords) on a shedload of my clients' sites citing an inadequate privacy policy.

Our account manager at Google said that it was a new requirement for using AdWords. I'm not sure if it's still a requirement but we put a privacy policy on all our sites by default.

 

[Andrew_P]

You should have it, especially from 25 May 2018, when new GDPR rules become active in EU:

Wiki: General_Data_Protection_Regulation