Privacy Policy, By Sutter Law, a San Francisco and Silicon Valley Business Law and Corporate Firm
When it comes time for your San Francisco or Silicon Valley Startup Company to launch its product or service, it is crucial that there exists a robust Privacy Policy for the Company available on the Company website.
Think of your Privacy Policy as a contract with your customers.
Do you need an attorney to draft your policy? As a San Francisco Business Attorney who reviews these privacy policies, I would highly recommend having a professional business contracts attorney draft custom policies to protect your company’s ability to use customer information.
For most people, the extent of interaction with a Company’s privacy policy is to get annoyed whenever it pops up on the website, then scroll immediately to the bottom and click “I Accept.” We all do it.
The thing is, the contents of these documents will provide crucial protection to the Company as a multitude of users use the product or service, and filter through the Company website.
Obviously, your Startup can’t negotiate a user agreement with every single user, so the privacy policy must be a one-size-fits-all agreement.
The Privacy Policy are legally binding agreement between the Company and the User.
The Company sets forth the terms under which it will allow the use of its service/product/website, and by clicking “Accept” or by merely using the service/product/website the User agrees to be bound by those terms.
The Privacy Policy will typically contain a great deal of detail specific to the Company regarding the methods of gathering, storing, and using data from its Users. The challenge for the Company’s attorney is to capture exactly what these processes are.
A good attorney will ask several probing questions of his Company client to ascertain exactly what their practices are with regard to data. Some back-and-forth between the Attorney and the Company is inevitable, but will eventually lead to a Privacy Policy that fully and accurately captures practices.
As with the Terms of Service, these questions are intended to give the Attorney a picture of practices…
- What data does the Company gather?
- How does the Company gather data? Does the Company use cookies?
- What security measures does the Company take to protect the data?
- How does the Company use the data once it is gathered?
- Does the Company share/sell gathered data with/to third parties?
- Does the Company website have links to third-party websites?
- Does the Company website have third-party advertisements?
- Can Users access and modify their stored data?
Sutter Law has put together Privacy Policies for many of San Francisco’s most successful Startup companies. If you would like assistance with your Privacy Policy (PP) agreements, feel free to reach out to Sutter Law for a free consultation with an experienced San Francisco and Silicon Valley Business Law Attorney.
