With the election last month, things got more strict for business website privacy policy California business owners need to make changes ASAP. Most residences voted yes for Proposition 24. If you don’t have these four types of pages set up properly on your website you could be fined $2,500 per website visitor.

4 Areas To Make Sure You Are Protected And Decrease The Website Privacy Policy California Business Effect:

• Why Is Privacy Policy Important?
• 4 Privacy Laws Required By Websites That Collect Personal Information
• What is Prop 24
• How to protect yourself from fines and lawsuits 

California’s new privacy laws affect local businesses. Prop 24 protects the customer, not your business. To protect yourself and feel secure from fines and lawsuits make sure your site has the right policy pages, terms and conditions page, or end-user license agreement page, etc. 

Why Is Privacy Policy Important?

It’s important to your customers and builds trust. A study by Privacy and American Business (P&AB) found that

“Consumers are particulary unhappy about the unauthorized use of their personal information for marketing, whether the use is by a company with which the consumer was a business relationship or by other companies with which the information was shared.

87 percent of consumers had asked a company to remove their name and address from a marketing list.”

I’m sure trust is important to you and you are a reputable company to do business with who’d never do anything that hinders your integrity but not everyone is like you and that’s why laws get passed. People have a bad experience and then because of their poor judgment, we all get affected.

If you collect personal information like name and email on your website, you need privacy policy pages. That means that if you have a “contact us” page or you have lead generating offers like “we will email you a 10% off coupon” you need a privacy policy page. Having policy pages written the right way can help you avoid fines and lawsuits. 

If your business works with anyone in California, your policy page is even more important to be written correctly. Why? There is now a state agency in charge of enforcing these laws for consumers.

As you can see here, this will affect 4.1 million small businesses in California.

I understand.

You’ve already been through so much this year with the pandemic. There is an easy and affordable way to protect your local business. So keep reading. 

4 Privacy Laws Required By Websites That Collect Personal Information

Currently, there are four laws in the US and the European Union that require most websites that collect personal information to have a Privacy Policy:

• European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• The California Online Privacy Protection Act (CalOPPA)
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• Nevada’s Revised Statutes Chapter 603A and SB220

These laws were created to protect the consumers of those states, countries, NOT the businesses. This means that these laws can apply to businesses outside of those states and countries and may apply to you if you collect the personal information of or enter into transactions with consumers from European Union, California, or Nevada.

Has this ever happened to you?

You search for a beige pair of pumps size 8 on Nordstrom but you decide to wait and buy them later. Then hours later you are searching for a healthy dinner recipe then you see the exact shoes on the blog website.

The next day you are buying a baby shower on Amazon then you see the shoes again.

The same thing happens when you go to Facebook. Those shoes keep following you around.

This is called “retargeting”. When you go to a website, you get a browser pixel or “cookie”.

If you click on the lock icon or the triangle by your URL you can see how many cookies your website has.

Looking at both of these images, which one makes you have customer trust? Does one make you feel more secure than the other?

As you can see on the right, they need to update their SSL certificate to make their site secure. The warning icon and red doesn’t make you feel good. I work with this company so I trust them and know I’m not being compromised and their web guy overlooked and probably just hasn’t updated the SSL but for someone new who doesn’t have a relationship with the brand…it looks really bad!

Since so many people voted YES for proposition 24, small businesses in California need to get your website policy pages set up correctly ASAP to avoid fines from the state agency that’s being formed right now.

What is Prop 24?

“Allows consumers to prevent businesses from sharing personal information, correct inaccurate personal information and limit businesses’ use of sensitive personal information including precise geolocation, race, ethnicity and health information.” – The Associated Press

This sounds great, right? Of course, none of us want our private information to be shared or sold. 

There hasn’t been much funding for the state agency to fine businesses that don’t follow CalOPPA and CCPA. So that’s why most likely you haven’t heard much about the importance of website policy pages.

What businesses do you think the state agency is going to focus on fining first?

This screenshot is from the U.S. Small Business Administration office of advocacy. If you are in the first 5 industries listed on here, I’d want to make sure my website had the right privacy policy pages. Also, Finance & Insurance, Real Estate, and Information businesses.

The screenshot above also shows how many self-employed Californias there are. Business owners who live up north if I were you, I’d make sure I was protected.

I’m just guessing here and of course 100% of all businesses with a website that has a “contact us” page needs to follow the privacy laws. You can’t ignore this anymore.

We know small businesses struggle to compete with corporate brands. We believe businesses with great reputations deserve to outsmart the big guys online so they can make a local impact and grow.

Most of the big guys already have their policy pages, cookies, and website set up properly because they have a big tech team and lawyer team.

We like to take care of the little guys that are making a difference in their neighborhood.

How to protect yourself from fines and lawsuits

Here are some options:

1. Hire an expensive lawyer every time a privacy law changes in the states or countries you collect private information from.
2. Ignore and do nothing. I mean I haven’t been fined in the past couple of years and don’t know anyone who has.
3. Keep what you currently have on your website, it should be ok, right?
4. Google “policy page template” and try to write it yourself.
5. Buy our policy page protection package.

Robert and I love working with couples that work together. We’ve been working with this policy page team for the past year protecting our clients. The wife is the lawyer and the husband makes sure us marketing agency owners and website developers are informed on the updates to make on our client’s sites.

Now more than ever you can’t ignore or keep up that old page your web guy put up 10 years ago.

Click HERE to learn more about our Policy Page Protection Package.

Within 7 days from purchasing you will be reassured that you are protected. You won’t get any surprise fines from the state agency. New customers who come to your website will trust you automatically.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and educate yourself on why you need to update your website to keep up with new California laws.

If you have questions or want us to write more on this topic. Leave us a comment below.

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