Should your website or blog have a privacy policy? Why would you want to have one? Are there any laws that require a privacy policy? Do small businesses (like bed and breakfast inns) need a privacy policy? What should my privacy policy include? Having a privacy policy is not something most small businesses think about when they think about content for their website. But should they? The short answer is yes.

We tweeted the TechCruch story about the site which, if you visited while logged in to a Google account, sent you an email proving it had just harvested your email information. Scary, isn’t it? Well, the screenshotof the website, itself (no, we didn’t visit it to see if it was true – besides, it was down by the time we got there . . . ) got us thinking about security and how this occurred.

When you think about it, attempting to provide security in a medium (social media) where the objective is to share (at least to some degree) personal aspects of your life, doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Mark Zukerberg of Facebook famously declared that privacy is dead. But is it? Should it be that way? Even with Facebook moving the goal posts every few weeks, and changing the way you control access to your data, and sometimes defaulting to very poor choices, you still have some opportunities to control what you share outside your circle of friends (real friends, I mean, not just Facebook “friends”).