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What is a privacy policy?
A privacy policy is a legal document that outlines how your organization collects, uses, stores, and protects the personal information of its website visitors and members. A visible, accessible privacy policy builds trust with visitors and ensures compliance with global data protection regulations.
See Your organization's policies for ideas on where to post your policy.
Essential components of a privacy policy
A privacy policy for a website typically includes the following:
- Information collection: The types of personal information your organization collects, including names, email addresses, and data gathered through cookies or tracking technologies.
- Purpose of data collection: Why your organization collects this information — for example, membership sign-up, event registration, or newsletter subscriptions.
- Data usage: How collected data is used, such as for communication, service delivery, website improvement, or marketing.
- Data sharing: Whether your organization shares data with third parties (sponsors, service providers, affiliates) and under what circumstances.
- Data protection and security: Measures taken to safeguard user data from unauthorized access, such as encryption, secure servers, and access controls.
- User rights: Users' rights regarding their personal information — including the right to access, correct, or delete their data — and how to exercise those rights.
- Cookies and tracking: If your site uses cookies or tracking technologies, their purpose, how users can manage them, and consent options.
- Policy updates: How users will be notified when the privacy policy changes.
- Contact information: How users can reach your organization with privacy-related questions or concerns.
- Legal compliance: The data protection laws your organization complies with, such as GDPR or CCPA.
- Effective date: When the policy took effect.
See the Society for Conservation GIS's privacy policy as an example.
Where to post your privacy policy
Several options for posting your privacy policy are available:
- Upload your privacy policy document to the Media Manager.
- Create a privacy policy article and link to it wherever you'd like.
- Add a link to your privacy policy in your website footer.
- Create a consent attribute in your database to track user consent.
- Contact our Support Team to add a policy or consent banner code snippet to your website.
Additional resources
Data privacy laws that may affect your organization include:
Resources for creating a privacy policy:
Note: As an MC Professional customer, you have access to discounted rates with Termly.
Examples from other organizations (do not copy verbatim):