Gut Check for Privacy Commitments

The Washington Post recently published a consumer guide to “sketchy” apps.  If you are a business owner who offers your customers a website, platform, portal, or app, this article is a good checklist for how those customers might be evaluating your privacy commitments.  Among other things, the WaPo piece suggests the following:

• Checking the California-mandated disclosures for information about whether the company sells personal data; 
• Reading privacy disclosures mandated by the owners of the app store; and 
• Checking the overall tone of the privacy policy. 

Customers are becoming more sophisticated, and more demanding, about privacy matters.  If you are interacting with them online in any way, it is a good idea to gut-check your own privacy disclosures to see whether they are keeping up with the times, in both tone and content.  With the proliferation of privacy laws at the state level and privacy litigation across the country, you will be doing yourself a favor legally as well as from a customer relations standpoint.