Don’t look now, but right now your data is being analyzed. And maybe you don’t care, maybe it’s not really that big of a deal for you, but a lot of people may not know much about the topic and get scared by these issues, and also a lot of people know a lot about the topic and have concerns that are legitimate, like the desire if you don’t want to be bombarded by targeted marketing pieces or simply want to have your privacy respected, no matter how simple the data that was going to be generated was.

And for those who care, and even to comply with the law in many countries, you need to have a privacy policy, where you address important issues and explain to users what data is ultimately being collected, how you store it. data and what to do in certain situations. Ideally, especially in large companies and in countries that have specific legislation for this, a lawyer would help with this matter.

But in the vast majority of cases where you will be providing this foundation yourself for your own sites and those of your customers, WordPress can help! And with that you will follow the law, act openly and loyally with your user and probably delight those who care about the subject.

How to generate the basis for your privacy policy through WordPress?

First, make sure you have your WordPress up to date, I confess that I can’t say for sure from which version this function would be available. Also make sure you’re doing this step at the end of the site’s production process, with all plugins already installed, you’ll soon see why.
Checked the version and installed all the plugins, let’s get started!

Log into your WordPress dashboard, go to settings and then to Privacy.

On this page, you will have the option to create a new privacy policy page, or use the address of an existing page to have its content updated with the WordPress privacy policy base template.

Once the page is created, you will see a base of this policy. An obvious first step is: remove “suggested text” at the beginning of each subject paragraph. After all, we might change some or all of this content, but it wouldn’t be nice to see that you just took a template and didn’t do anything.

Now keep this page open, open another tab and go back to the WordPress dashboard, go to settings and then to Privacy (yes, again).

Now, select on the entire screen, next to Settings, the “Policy Tab” section. In this section you will see a guide with some instructions and you will see a section down the screen for each plugin relevant to the theme on your site (at least you should have). Here is a note of congratulations to WPMUDev: all their relevant plugins have their texts in this section!

Here you will see a base text for each plugin installed on your site that has included in its documentation a text for that part.

In this step, reflect a little if there is any plugin that should, but doesn’t have, have your text here. Examples of plugins that should have their text here are email marketing, forms, tracking plugins that collect data for processing or that somehow redirect or show some external image.

Now, look at the text for each plugin and think about it: does this text fit for my site?

Some examples:

Maybe some plugin, such as WPMU Dev’s Hummingbird, uses an external CDN, but maybe you don’t use this function.

Some plugins like has a lot of texts on integrations with various types of email marketing and CRM tools, but obviously, you’re only going to use one or two of those.

Another issue is that some plugins, such as form plugins, need to have added and explained in the privacy policy what data is collected, for example:

“We collect name, email, phone and texts entered in the subject field of each form.”

Lastly, also consider providing a way for your user to erase their data. This medium can be something as simple as a form or a contact email AND be concerned about making this medium really work, for the user and for your customer. It’s no use putting an email there from your client who owns the site, if he is not technically able to take some action, such as deleting someone’s data from the email marketing list.

So that’s it for today!

If you have any questions or have any ideas that I didn’t address, share them with us in the comments.

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