Question about privacy settings. I maintain a few sites for my own business and projects that are purely informational; I don’t gather any information*, do any tracking, or anything like that. *—Unless they fill in my contact form, of course.
Circumstances led me to using the DuckDuckGo browser on my iPhone for a bit, and I noticed that my sites take a big hit on their privacy grade because of “unknown privacy practices.”
So I’m curious … If I turn on “enable privacy support,” what would be the best settings and what sort of legal text to indicate that I’m not collecting any private information from viewers?
And … it seems like I’d need to set a cookie to confirm viewers acknowledging that I don’t use cookies? XD Amusing.
Thanks, any input on this would be appreciated!
-cooner
I wouldn’t read too much into the DuckDuckGo grading, searching around I found:
apparently all websites get a letter deduction for “unknown privacy practices” until DDG reviews them — and they’ve only reviewed the big players
I don’t know how accurate this is, but it sounds reasonable. There certainly isn’t a machine readable standard for a website to declare what privacy policies it adopts, and there most definitely isn’t any way to automatically ensure the policy is well meaning, let alone respected by the company.
Sparkle’s privacy support will ensure your site visitors aren’t exposed to tracking cookies until they accept the cookie banner, and presumably click through to the privacy policy page. Sparkle does this by preventing load of all social elements and embed content where the “activate after consent” checkbox is on.
Setting the cookie is ridiculous but the only way to not ask over and over. It’s a “technical cookie” so not subject to the usual policies.
Saying what you do with the emailed information is something that needs to be covered in a privacy policy. Your web server also collects visitor records, your contract with your web hosting provider probably puts the burden for that on you.
With all that said, you should ask a lawyer for a privacy policy, no advice given here is of any use if you get to a point where the privacy practices are challenged legally.
Following on from that, I’m getting bit snowed under with trying to set up the cookie and privacy policy according to EU standards. It’s obviously legally necessary now to state everything absolutley correctly according to GDPR legal regulations, so I looked at iubenda which provides all the legally binding wording and generates a cookie and privacy policy page which automatically updates itself. With this in mind is it safer just to use their privacy and cookie generators, or am I making things too complicated?
We use the privacy policy from iubenda. They haven’t changed it in a long time so not sure about the auto updating nature. But yeah in theory.
Their cookie solution is overkill on the data collection side (a stock sparkle site doesn’t deal with personally identifiable information), and doesn’t integrate well with sparkle’s restriction on content that exposes the visitor (YouTube, maps, embeds etc).
Thanks for your reply. I have another issue with publishing my site and hope you don’t mind me raising it here. I get the error sign jonmortimermuisc.com appears to be parked. I use United Domains as my server and they can’t see anything wrong from their side. I have deleted my old website with the intention of replacing it with the new Sparkle website. I enclose a screen shot of the problem Any ideas?18|690x388
Thanks very much
Thanks for your input, Yes, I do have my domain with United Domains. I deleted my old website from the webspace so it is now just waiting to be filled again with the new website.
Don’t see the screenshot but Sparkle lets you bypass that. Parked domain detection is somewhat unreliable and some web host setups trigger it more then others, but you can tell sparkle to proceed.
