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Creative Commons Privacy Policies: Notes on Use

This privacy policy is provided in HTML code suitable to be cut and paste into a WordPress powered site (i.e. with HTML tags for headings, a few unordered lists and one small table, but without HTML headers or paragraph tags etc). It should therefore pick up on the styles used by your own web site without needing any additional formatting. However, you can add your own styling if needed. If you’d like to read a version (slightly modified) without the HTML tags, you can read our privacy policy.

In order to use our privacy policies, we suggest that you take the following steps:

a. Determine their suitability

To do this, we suggest you carefully read through the main WordPress Privacy Policy downloads page.

We have also included some comments and guidance in the text. These comments appear inside tags that look like this:

<!-- This is a comment -->

If you leave those comments in, they will not be shown to the users of those web sites, but feel free to remove them if you prefer (except for the final comment regarding attribution).

b. Download

Using the explanations provided on the Wordpress Privacy Policy downloads page, choose the most suitable version for you:

  • Basic: Creative Commons Privacy Policy – Basic (13.57 KB), v.1.0 (2-Apr-2010) (Txt File).
  • Standard: Creative Commons Privacy Policy – Standard (16.59 KB), v.1.0 (2-Apr-2010) (Txt File).
  • Comprehensive: Creative Commons Privacy Policy – Comprehensive (18.29 KB), v.1.0 (2-Apr-2010) (Txt File).

    • c. Find and Replace

    Copy the file text using your favourite text editor (e.g. Notepad, Notepad ++, TextPad or the like). Perform a “find and replace” on the following terms:

    #Organisation > The name of your web site
    #Domain > The domain name of your web site
    #Phone > Your phone number in whatever format you prefer
    #Address > Your address
    #Contact > The URL (or web address) of your “contact us” form

    Note: if you do not wish to be contacted by any of the above means, you should remove the relevant portions of the text (see the comments in the text).

    We have not included an email contact address because of the danger of receiving spam communications. If you must use an email address, please add this in, otherwise we suggest you use a free Wordpress plugin to set up a “contact us” form. We suggest something like Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0, but there are plenty of good ones out there.

    Remember, under the National Privacy Principles you are required to identify the person or organisation who will be receiving the personal information, and you must give a reasonable way for people to contact you.

    d. Read and Edit

    Make sure that you read and thoroughly understand the Privacy Policy and the embedded comments, as you’re representing that you’ll be bound by the document. The Creative Commons Licence allows you to edit the document to suit your own needs (among other reasons), but please do not remove or alter the protected content or links at the bottom of the page (see the inserted notes).

    As with all of the Content on our site (see our Terms of Use), this Privacy Policy is designed for general use, and does not represent specific legal advice. If you have any reason to be unsure about anything in the document, or whether it is suitable for your particular circumstances, please contact us, or another law firm that is familiar with privacy law.

    Further, we would encourage you to read about your general privacy obligations by visiting the Australian Privacy Commissioner’s Web Site. This covers many issues that are not explicitly disclosed in the privacy policy, including your obligation to keep the information safe.

    e. Post

    For WordPress users, log in to your “Admin” backend, go to “Pages” and click “Add new”. Make sure you are editing in “HTML” mode rather than “Visual Mode” as shown in the image below:

    Copy your edited document from your text editor and then paste it into the window.

    You might want to hide the privacy policy from your main menus and insert a link in the footer instead. We can recommend Simon Wheatley’s “Exclude Pages from Navigation” plugin to be extremely useful.