If you collect information about people, you have a legal requirement to let them know you are doing so. This applies to both the real world and the Internet.You might not always realise when your website collects information about visitors, but it may be far more frequently than you think.Websites gather and store data about users by creating and placing ‘cookies’ on the user’s browser. Many elements of your website will refer back to these cookies to make sure they are providing the correct content to the specific user.To start with, you may have installed a website traffic monitoring service such as Google analytics. These systems attach cookies to users which contain data about every visit to your website. Whilst the information collected isn’t personally identifiable, it does mean that you know quite a lot about your visitors. You know how they found your website; which pages they looked at; where they are; and what browser they’re using.Secondly, many checkout funnels use cookies to identify users as they move from one stage of the purchasing process to the next.Aside from cookies, you may collect information in a more conventional way. You might give people the option to get in touch using a feedback form. At the very least you’ll be asking for their name, phone number and email address.If you’re selling online, then you will of course be requesting even more details, including name and shipping address.All this means that you should be letting your website visitors know you’re collecting information about them. This is where your privacy policy comes takes centre stage.A privacy policy can be a text based page on your website, which explains to users that you’re gathering information about them during their visit to your website – and how you are doing it. The privacy policy page shouldn’t be a big part of your website – it certainly doesn’t need to be on the main menu. You can simply link to it from the footer, or from your ‘about us’ page. In order to find a privacy policy that’s right for your website, just search on Google for ‘privacy policy template’. There are hundreds there for you to download and modify. Try to tailor the template to suit your website.Quite apart from fulfilling your legal obligations, some believe that having a privacy policy can help boost your website higher in the organic search results. When search engines rank your website, a privacy policy is one element (amongst thousands) that they look for.If you’ve any feedback about using a privacy policy on your website, please leave it below.