Blogger? Where is your privacy policy? July 17th, 2008
If you are a blogger, here is something to ponder. If you have comments enabled on your blog or even have people registering on your blog to comment or otherwise interact with your site, you should have a privacy policy in place. Why? Well, because draft privacy legislation doing the rounds in Parliament will require that you publish one on your blog.
The thing is, if you allow people to comment on your blog and, like the majority of blogs these days, your blog contains fields for the commentator’s name, email address and web address, you are collecting personal information which is protected by that draft legislation and which, in turn, requires that you publish a policy that tells visitors to your site the following:
- what information you are collecting;
- what you are going to do with that information; and
- manipulation and disclosure of that personal information.
There is an increasing number of legal pitfalls for publishers which must increasingly be dealt with using website terms of use and privacy policies. It sounds like overkill for your blog about your life which you may contribute to once or twice a week for your family members and three friends but that is simply not the case. Like most contracts and terms and conditions we encounter in our daily lives, these sorts of documents become risk management tools. We use them to guard against an array of risks that usually don’t occur to people, such as intellectual property infringement and privacy concerns. There are also jurisdictional issues, dispute resolution mechanisms and indemnities.
It sounds like something meant to make lawyers even richer but consider the possible consequences of being sued for copyright infringement on your blog or defamation arising out of inflammatory comments your visitors make. What about personal information stored in your admin section being accessed and sold off by unauthorised third parties? There are real risks which should be borne in mind. Social media empowers everyone to become a publisher. With that power comes the responsibility both to yourself and to your readers to put measures in place to minimise risk.
These implications for smaller publishers got me thinking about what bloggers can do to protect themselves. The usual solution is to either rip terms of use from sites on the Web (which are often poorly drafted and have more holes than Oxford Road or which are not really applicable to our legal system) or to have a lawyer prepare these documents (which can be pricey). It is a tough situation and one which probably leaves bloggers thinking that the risks isn’t so formidable given the steps that need to be taken to guard against them. That isn’t terribly helpful either because all you need is someone to take offence and suddenly blogging isn’t such a wonderful idea.
Another solution comes to mind and I am really just mulling over how to implement it. I wonder if a solution wouldn’t be to prepare terms of use and a privacy policy for bloggers and smaller publishers at a reduced cost and which still contains much of what you would need to guard against the bigger risks? I find myself wondering if I couldn’t come up with a workable solution for bloggers. Almost like the way Creative Commons licenses are so readily available and easy to implement … ?
What do you think? I am just causing a ruckus unnecessarily? I’m not sure that I am. Local bloggers have been sued over off the cuff comments which were defamatory. Being sued means you are forced to fork out tens of thousands of rands (at least) to either fight or settle. Not a pleasant thought.
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blog, legislation, privacy, terms and conditions, terms of use, legal, blogging, defamation
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