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The Internet may be a virtual environment but it poses as
many dangers as any public one. With viruses, worms, identity
theft and spam prevalent on the net, surfers and site owners
alike have a lot to fear from unscrupulous types.
Not only should you protect others from hacking into your
Gambling site or servers; you need to protect yourself from
complaints and litigation by your surfers. Whether you know
it or not, you are probably downloading things to your visitor's
computers. If you use a site counter service or forum registration
on your site, you are in fact assisting in putting cookies
on a viewer's machine. If you have a newsletter that you
send to subscribers, you are entrusted to inform them of
what you're going to do with that database of addresses.
If you plan to share those email addresses with another
website for the purposes of traffic trading, you need to
know what they will do with the information you give or
sell to them. Your surfers should be informed of your privacy
policies not because it's a good idea but because informing
them protects you.
When a person buys a product, that product comes with certain
disclaimers. For instance, you've probably seen the warnings
on blow dryers that tell the user not to use the unit while
sleeping. As ridiculous as it sounds, somebody in the past
did just this with the dryer and were probably injured.
The blow dryer manufacturer includes this usage disclaimer
so that when somebody (who injured themselves or property
by trying to use the unit as a room heater) attempts to
sue them, they will not be held responsible for that person's
misuse. Your Gambling website needs disclaimers like this
because you are collecting information from you visitors.
Such a disclaimer for Internet sites is known as a privacy
policy.
A privacy policy is basically a text document that tells
your site visitors what you will do with the information
you collect from them. Most sites post a link to their privacy
policy on their front page. They do this as a service for
their surfers and because it's a web standard to do so.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has set standards for
privacy policies and legitimate sites comply with those
standards. Sites that do not have compliant privacy policies
can even be blocked out by the newer browser's default security
settings.
Even if you don't plan on collecting email addresses or
selling by credit card on your site, you need a privacy
policy. If you so much as set one cookie, you need a privacy
policy. If you want to present your Gambling website as
a professional Internet location, you need a privacy policy.
Privacy policies inform the user and protect the website.
If you wish to learn more about web standards and policies,
visit the website of the World Wide Web Consortium located
at: http://www.w3.org
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