Privacy issues

Privacy importance
The internet has many dangers; even you think it's just a virtual environment. The technology today is advanced and it may also be used by dishonest types. There are viruses, worms, identity theft and spam prevalent on the net.

The privacy issue is an important one. You should protect your site or servers from hacking and also protect yourself from complaints and litigation by your surfers. Always there's the chance you are downloading unwanted things to your customers computers without knowing it. Using a forum registration or a site counter service you actually support the sending of cookies on a visitor's computer.

If you are sending your surfers newsletter, you need to inform them of your intention with the list of addresses. If you intend to share the list with another site for trading traffic, you need to know what they will do with the information you give or sell to them. You must inform your visitors of your privacy policies because to inform your surfers, means you are protecting you.

Almost any product that you will buy (at least quality ones) comes also with a disclaimer. For example, you have read the disclaimer for blow dryers in which the user is informed not to use the unit while sleeping. Many of those information's may sound silly, but someone in the past did this and probably he was injured. The reason of those disclaimers is that if anyone injured themselves or their property while using the blow drier as a heater and wants to sue the manufacturer for this, the company cannot be held responsible for that person's mishandling.

The same situation applies to your gambling website for the reason that you are collecting information from you surfers. In the internet world, a disclaimer is known as a privacy policy. This is in essence a text document that informs your visitors what you intend to do with the information collected from them. Usually, a link to the privacy policy section is posted in the front page of the website. This is regarded as a service for the visitors and also a web standard set by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Legitimate sites meet the terms of those standards and the ones who do not agree to the standards can even be blocked out by the newer browser's default security settings.

If you are thinking that you do not plan to sell by credit card on your site, or you do not plan to collect email addresses, you still need a privacy policy. Setting just one cookie, there you go, you need a privacy policy. You want your website to be regarded as a professional website, there you go again, you need that privacy policy. They inform the user and protect the website.