Why is this important?
In the European Union, the pertinent legal framework regarding privacy, and thus and Privacy Policies, is the Data Protection Directive and the ePrivacy Directive. Article 10 of the Data Protection Directive notes that every data subject (user, consumer, etc.) has a right to know who is processing their personal information.
If your application or website doesn’t provide a proper Privacy Policy (or provide any Policy whatsoever) and users are not fully aware of your privacy practices, then users are giving you uninformed consent.
At a minimum, you must inform users about:
- Who the processor of the information is. This includes the business’ contact information.
- The categories of personal data the business will collect and process through its website or mobile app.
- Why is the personal information collected for.
- Whether the collected information will be disclosed to third parties.
- How the user may exercise their rights further in connection to deletion of information and withdrawal of consent.
- This is critical. The only way for the consent of a user to be valid is if the user has been presented with this information.
This is done through the Privacy Policy. Your Privacy Policy should be freely available to all users, registered or not, on your website, mobile app and any platform your business uses to collect personal information from users. The privacy policy is best linked from every page in the website for easy access and at the same time avoid the misconspeption that the organization is attempting to hide the policy deep within the website.
How can I resolve this issue?
Have a link to your privacy policy on every page of your website, this is normally found in your footer.
What topics do this checkpoint affect?
Can you explain how this checkpoint works?
The checkpoint examines a page and reports if there is no link <href> tag containing the word 'privacy'. DQM applies a number of foreign language versions to this check, please do reach out to our support team should a website be using a variation of the word for other languages.
