Protect yourself if you stay with CJ

by Sapphire (October 21, 2005)

I’m going to continue using CJ despite the insane new PSA they’ve put into place that strips all our rights while creating loopholes to be exploited by them or by the merchants. Here’s what I’m doing to protect myself.

I’ve made a PDF of the whole thread of Todd’s responses at ABW. When a bona fide representative of a company makes statements contradicting an agreement in place, judges take that into consideration. I’ll upload the PDF file and post a link to it tomorrow. I suggest downloading it and storing it yourself, just to be absolutely sure you have it when/if you need them.

As for the privacy policy - if you read the thread, you know Todd said we didn’t have to do what the PSA said - here’s what I’m using. I’m no lawyer, and this advice may be worth what you’re paying, but do your own research. That’s how I came up with this. Just replace “[MySite]” with the name of your site, or the words “this site”.

Personal Information
[MySite] does not request or collect any information that that personally identifies you or allows you to be personally contacted.

Information Logged
Like every website, [MySite] automatically logs IP addresses. IP addresses identify only broad demographic information, allowing the adminstrator to diagnose possible problems with our servers and monitor visitor trends (for example, determining which pages are most popular).

Advertisers
[MySite] uses outside ad companies to display ads on the site. These ads may contain cookies. Cookies received with these ads are collected by the third party companies, and we do not have access to this information. [MySite] is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such Web sites.

External Links
[MySite] contains links to other sites. [MySite] is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such Web sites.

Security
[MySite] has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control.

Contacting the Web Site
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this web site, please use our contact form to contact the administrator.

The “Information Logged” section clears you for anyone attempting a lawsuit about Apache server stats. One would hope that’s too ridiculous ever to happen, but uh…

The “Advertisers” section is the part that covers you with CJ or any PPC or other third-party advertisers.

The “External Links” section also covers you with CJ et al. Basically, it says you’re not vouching for the security or ethics of anyone we link to, and can’t be held responsible for what they do with your visitors.

The “Security” section is a nice bit of legalese. To the visitor it means we try to keep hackers away. To a judge it means we employ industry standard security techniques, nothing more, and if those fail, it’s not our fault.

Anything beyond that - particularly what the PSA specifies - I would not recommend. I’m not a lawyer, and this advice may be worth what you’re paying for it. But I’m positive the PDF’s can’t hurt you, and I’m pretty sure my example privacy policy is at least safer for you than what the PSA describes!

The other thing I’m doing to protect myself is burying all my CJ links in product links from ShareASale. The CJ links will remain on my site (I’m not willing to bow out completely just yet, not knowing what the future might hold), but the visitors will come to the ShareASale links first.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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