For anyone with a website, here’s an instructive post from my namesake, California attorney Nina Yablok on privacy policies. She raises the excellent point that you need to be careful what you promise in your privacy policies. As long as you’re in control of the website, you may want to promise that you won’t share the information with anyone. Ever.
But that policy could come back to haunt you, should you want to sell your company . . . and the mailing list as one of its assets. There are a couple of ways to work around that. You could carve out a specific exception on your website (“won’t disclose except if the company is sold”). Or, if you run into a situation where disclosure might come up, you could contact each and every one of your subscribers, inform them of the situation, and ask for their consent to disclose the information. It’s tedious, but at least you are respecting their privacy.
Why wouldn’t one protect the mailing list by stipulating in the sales contract of the business that the privacy policies must be maintained?
SBT