Why Your Website Needs These Policies
If your website has a contact form, an email sign-up, Google Analytics, or almost any other common feature, you’re collecting personal information from your visitors. Names, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses. Most states and countries have laws that require you to disclose how you collect, store, and use that information. These laws apply to small businesses, not just large corporations.
A Privacy Policy tells your visitors what you’re collecting and why. A Cookie Policy and consent tool tell them what trackers are running on your site and give them a way to opt out. Terms of Service set the rules for using your site and protect your business if something goes wrong. Depending on what your site does, you may also need a Disclaimer or an End-User License Agreement.
Did you know that if you have a contact form on your website that you’re collecting personally identifiable information or PII?
Governments around the world have passed privacy laws to protect the PII of its residents. These laws require most websites that collect PII to have a Privacy Policy with specific disclosures. Each of these laws has its own set of unique requirements as to what your Privacy Policy needs to disclose, as well as unique penalties for not complying.
Penalties can be strict too with fines starting at $2,500 per violation per website visitor.
To make matters more complicated, privacy laws are constantly changing, and new ones are regularly going into effect – meaning a compliant Privacy Policy today, might not be compliant tomorrow.
Some proposed privacy bills include private right of action, meaning those individuals could even sue businesses regardless of their location for not having a compliant privacy policy. And because privacy laws protect people, website owners may need to comply with multiple laws regardless of where their business is located.
That is why we created Termageddon.
Termageddon is a website policies generator that helps you identify which privacy laws apply to you and bases your Privacy Policy on the disclosures you are specifically required to make.
Termageddon then monitors privacy laws, notifies you of changes, and can even automatically update your Privacy Policy through an embed code on your website to reflect the new disclosures required by changing legislation.
With Termageddon, you get a full set of policies to protect your business all for just $12 a month or $119 a year – saving you both time and money.
Ask your web developer how you can get set up with Termageddon and protect your business today.
What We Do (and Don’t Do)
We are not attorneys, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Deciding which policies your website needs, and keeping them accurate and up to date, is your responsibility as the business owner.
We also don’t write these policies ourselves. Privacy law changes often and gets complicated fast. Getting it wrong can be costly, so we partner with Termageddon, a company that specializes in this.
Why We Recommend Termageddon
Termageddon is a policy generator and cookie consent tool built by a team that includes a privacy attorney. One license covers your Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, consent tool, Terms of Service, Disclaimer, and End User License Agreement, all for a single annual or monthly fee.
Laws around this change constantly: several updates hit in 2025, more in 2026, and more are coming in 2027. Termageddon tracks it all and automatically updates your policies whenever anything changes. You won’t have to think about it again after setup.
You’re not required to use Termageddon. If you’d rather use a different service or have an attorney draft your policies, that works too. Just send us the finished text, and we’ll add it to your site.
Common Questions About Website Policies
If your site has a contact form, a newsletter sign-up, analytics, or any tool that collects a name, email, or IP address, then yes. These laws apply based on where your visitors live, not where your business is located, so they can apply to you even if you’re a small local business.
More than you’d think. Contact forms, email sign-ups, blog comments, online stores, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, embedded Google Maps, embedded YouTube videos, and spam filters like reCAPTCHA all count. Most modern websites have at least one of these.
If your site uses analytics, advertising pixels, embedded maps, or embedded videos, it’s setting cookies. If visitors from states like California, Virginia, or Colorado (or from the EU, UK, or Canada) can reach your site, you likely need a consent tool. This is also an area where small businesses have been sued for tracking visitors without permission.
Termageddon recommends it for every site. It answers customer questions about refunds or shipping and protects your logo and content from being copied. It also limits your liability if a visitor clicks a link to another site and runs into trouble there.
You can, but we don’t recommend it. Writing accurate policies means knowing which laws apply to you and tracking every change to those laws, then updating your site each time something shifts. Copying another site’s policy carries the same risk. It may not even suit your business, and it can raise copyright issues.
Again, we don’t recommend it. AI tools can produce text that looks like a policy, but they don’t know which laws apply to your business and can’t track changes to those laws afterward. A generated policy might miss a required disclosure or misstate what your site actually collects. It can also go stale the next time a law changes. That’s the same risk as copying a template, with one added problem: the output reads confident even when it’s wrong.
No. Many of these laws apply to businesses of any size, regardless of revenue or number of employees. Fines for non-compliance can start at $2,500 per website visitor. Business size doesn’t exempt you.
Yes. It’s a common misconception that non-profit status means these laws don’t apply to you. Some privacy laws, including California’s CCPA, exempt non-profits because they only cover for-profit “businesses.” Other laws, like GDPR and the UK’s data protection law, apply based on who your visitors are and what you collect, not your tax status. If your site collects donor or visitor information and can be reached by people in the EU, the UK, or other regulated regions, you may be subject to those laws regardless of whether you are a 501(c)(3).
One thing to know: visitors who opt out of cookies won’t show up in tools like Google Analytics or Google Ads. Your traffic doesn’t actually drop, just what your reports can see, so your numbers may look a little lower than they really are. Visitors will also see a quick one-time prompt asking for their choice. Most people are used to this by now, since it’s standard on most websites.
Want to Go Deeper? Download Termageddon’s Free Privacy Guide
For a closer look at what these laws mean for a small business, download Termageddon’s free guide: Small Business Guide to Privacy. It covers what personal information you’re likely to collect, which laws might apply to you, and what to do about it.
Want to get this set up on your site? Talk with our team, and we’ll walk you through it.
