Ep 27: How to keep up with privacy policies with Donata Kalnenaite

Problem: The difficulties of constantly updating your privacy policy

A lot of companies are using templates online or taking privacy policies from their competitors but this isn’t necessarily the best practice for your specific company. 

You might be subjecting yourself to a lot more requirements than you actually need to comply with.

The privacy policy needs of you and your website

• Do you need to comply with GDPR?
• What are the regulations and privacy laws in your country?
• How does your target market feel about their online privacy?

There’s a recent study that came out saying that 52% of Americans would leave a website or a platform if they feel like their privacy is not being respected.

Because our federal government isn’t passing a federal privacy bill, states are coming up with their own versions which are different from one another. This can make it difficult for businesses to be compliant with privacy laws since these specific laws are different across state lines and because they change on a regular basis.

The thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that small businesses need to comply with these laws too. 

How does Termageddon solve this problem?

Since a citizen of any state can go onto your website, the laws within their own state will apply to your business and website. Keeping track of the 12 states who have enacted their own privacy laws (and that number is only going to go up), can be a full-time job and business owners don’t have that kind of time.  OnsTermageddon solves that problem by keeping track of these regulations and laws for their clients. 

Privacy laws are very unique in that they protect consumers of a certain state, not businesses.

The evolving privacy policies all over the world

In order to stay on top of the ever-evolving world of privacy policies, Donata uses a multitude of software including

• LexisNexis – software for both risk and legal/professional solutions (Google for lawyers)
• LegiScan – a tool which compiles legislation from all 50 states
• News from the attorney generals
• The International Association of Privacy Professionals – which has a current and helpful safe privacy bill tracker 

It’s really important, regardless of the industry you’re in, to make sure that you have all of the disclosures that you need to have.

Termageddon was created because of the difficult process of having to keep up with the changing of and the increasing number of privacy policies. For small businesses, the fines that could accrue could be devastating. Termageddon is meant to be a simple solution that won’t take up a lot of your time or resources (financial or otherwise). 

One industry that I was really surprised by was lawyers. I kind of really thought that we weren’t going to be used by lawyers. I kinda thought lawyers would write their own.

Problems that Donata would like to see solved:

To be honest, I would like to go outside. If anyone has any good tech conferences that I could attend, I would love to attend them. Cause, while it’s not the same, it would be nice to talk to people who don’t live in my house.