"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                  August 18, 1998
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   "The Desktop Global Marketer" is free, and may be 
   re-published freely with permission. We encourage 
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   For any other purpose, please write to:
   	jamie(at)siderealdesigns.com
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Privacy Policy: Does Your Web Site Have One?

Do you have a public statement of your privacy policy on your web
site? Here's why you should, and where to find some models for one.

According to surveys of on-line behavior, one of the principal things
that dissuades people from giving you their email address for such
otherwise legitimate purposes as subscribing to your newsletter is the
fear that the information will be more widely distributed.

We spoke last time about 'spam', or unsolicited mass commercial
mailings on the Internet. The fear of finding themselves on yet
another list of email addresses for sale to spammers is high on the
list of privacy invasions that people fear, and which makes them
reluctant to give out personal information, and especially email
addresses.

A recent event has underscored this concern, and possibly made life
harder for all of us on the Web. GeoCities is a large web-hosting
service that offers free web site hosting. They make their money
through advertising directed at people who visit the web pages of the
people who have their sites hosted there. Fair enough; it's
free. However, GeoCities required a fairly detailed form to be filled
out for such a free site, which included a great deal of personal
information; even such things as hobbies. Personally, I would have
been suspicious at that point, but GeoCities reportedly had policy
statements posted on their site assuring users that the information
would not be released and would be used only for internal purposes.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently charged that GeoCities had
in fact been selling the information to third party marketers.
GeoCities has signed an agreement with the FTC agreeing not to do
this, but without admitting guilt. But the event occurred a few days
after GeoCities had gone public with its stock offering, and investors
showed that they understood the gravity of even a suspicion of such an
offense for an Internet business. They pummeled the shares, and the
president of GeoCities is thought to have personally suffered paper
losses on the order of $12 million. My point is not to further
excoriate GeoCities, but to illustrate the dangers of any hint of
laxness in protecting the privacy of your web-site visitors.

The FTC has noted that only 14% of on-line businesses have any formal
statement on their web sites spelling out how they will or will not
use personal information collected from visitors. This is not to say
they're misusing it, they're probably not, but it is becoming
increasingly important to give people a binding, public assurance in
an explicit manner if you want to conduct business on the web.

This is something I had had on my stack of things to do, and the day I
saw the GeoCities story I moved it to the top of the stack. I first
went to the FTC web site ( http://ftc.gov ) and found a lot of good
information about privacy and the law, and what the FTC is doing about
it. Sure enough, right up there at the top of the home page was the
FTC's link to its own privacy policy statement. Figuring I couldn't go
wrong right from the horse's mouth, I carried it off and reworked it
where appropriate as a model for Sidereal Designs' own privacy
policy. You can see the result at
http://siderealdesigns.com/privacy.shtml, and feel free to copy it
for your own use if you like. Then I put a link to it on our home page
and at every point on our web site where we request personal
information. I also put it into our "Useful Stuff" page at a spot
where I demonstrate the kinds of information that can be automatically
extracted from visitors' browser connections.

If it persuades even one customer to contact us who otherwise might
not have, it will have been well worth the trouble. I'd recommend you
make the same investment of time.

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"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
or pertaining to the stars, the heavens, etc."