“How Privacy Breach Notification Law Affects Your Blog” plus 1 more

How Privacy Breach Notification Law Affects Your Blog

Posted: 17 Jul 2012 01:09 PM PDT

This guest post is by Matt Setter of MaltBlue.com.

Do you run a web-based business and collect data about your customers? If so, do you have professional practices in place to ensure the protection of that information and the privacy of your customers? No? Then ask not for whom the bell tolls, as it tolls for you—Privacy Breach Notification Laws are here.

Before you scramble to fire off an email to your service provider to disable your ecommerce facilities or remove all forms from your blog, don't. If you're running a small site or a modest-sized mailing list and don't collect any information on your visitors, then please don't be alarmed.

However, irrespective of the scope of your online presence, please take a few minutes to get yourself up to date on what privacy breach notification laws are, and how they impact you.

Despite how much we love all things web, we know that it can be a bit of a wild west out there. We hear reports of security breaches at companies big and small, such as the recent ones at both LinkedIn and eHarmony. But do we stop to think just how much impact these breaches have, and what our legal obligations are?

What happens if the password that the person used for one hacked account was the same one they use for many other accounts, or all of them? What if the attack was particularly malicious and the attackers decided to comb the information and carry out subsequent attacks based on the identified information?

What if, as a result of the attack(s), a civil case was brought against you for the damages caused to one or more of your customers? Are you prepared to deal with the security breach or the consequent legal ramifications?

As I said, we love the web. I sure do. We love its convenience, simplicity and immediateness. But it comes at a price—one most of us haven’t considered in too much depth.

What are the laws?

Lucky for us, some people have. In 2002 the ball started rolling in California, with Senator Joe Simitian, who authored a bill to require that businesses notify customers when a successful breach of their security occurs. This bill was amended in 2011 to become even stronger.

The bill states:

“notification to affected California residents will need to include, at a minimum:

The name and contact information of the reporting agency, person or business;
A list of the types of personal information that were or are reasonably believed to have been the subject of the breach;
The toll-free telephone numbers and addresses of the major credit reporting agencies if the breach exposed a Social Security number or a driver's license or California identification card number;

and, to the extent it is possible to determine at the time the notice is provided:

The date of the notice and any of the following:

the date of the breach,
the estimated date of the breach or
the date range within which the breach occurred;

Whether the notification was delayed because of a law enforcement investigation (if applicable); and
A general description of the breach incident.

You may be thinking this is just for California and it doesn't relate to you because you live in Massachussets or Washington. Or maybe you live outside the US, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom or elsewhere.

But you'd be wrong. If you're outside the US, the situation's potentially even tougher:

In 2002 the European Union (EU) started enacting a series of directives that affect all member states, including the Data Protection Directive and Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.
Australia doesn't have these same laws, but a recent study, reported on by the University of Canberra, indicates that the laws may be coming soon.
New Zealand is set to overhaul its privacy laws through the course of 2012 and beyond.

It's fair to say that if all these jurisdictions are moving in the same direction, a number of the others will likely follow suit—if they're not already.

What can you do?

While this is all concerning stuff, there are steps that you can take—from simple, right through to complex—to protect your site from security breaches. Perkins Thompson suggest a set of steps that we can use as a basis of what to do to put our blogs in a good position.

Adopt "commercially reasonable" data security measures

Be aware of security breaches for bloggers by staying up to date on current events. Look for simple methods, such as using plugins that help protect your user accounts whether on your blog or on your organization’s computer network.

Secure physical access to mobile computing and mobile storage devices

Don't leave your laptops and phones lying around, as you likely have sensitive information on them. We all slip from time to time, so make sure you have a good password protecting access to them. Consider using 1Password which provides secure protection of your passwords, accounts and sensitive information.

Limit the scope and duration of data retention

Do you need to keep all the information that you have? How long do you need to keep it for? If it's no longer required, then consider getting rid of it.

Develop procedures to monitor and audit data security in your company

Whether your business is big or small, find a security vendor or consultant who you can talk with to assess your security needs. If necessary, consider a security audit.

Train and educate your employees, and follow your company's data security policy or agreement

Ensure that all of your staff know that security is serious and are following the policies. Security doesn't need to be draconian, but a normal matter of course.

Carefully select third-party providers

Which services do you use as part of your day-to-day operations? Do you use Harvest, FreshBooks, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter? What's their approach and history of security breaches?

Consider cyber-insurance policies

Though insurance can be an "after the fact" type of approach, it can be a good to have in case something goes wrong. UK Insurance broker, Chris Knight, has this to say:

"Many businesses do not fully understand the risks associated with using the internet, but it is now possible to purchase cover for Cyber Liability and Privacy Breach Notification.

"These provide cover for legal action taken against the business in the cyber world and the cost of notification of any breach that may occur."

Develop procedures to quickly respond to a data security breach

Even the best companies and organisations can be hacked—it's a fact and we know it. But users often respond in a positive way despite this if the company responds in both a timely and professional manner. Consider implementing a set of procedures to respond to such a situation occurring on your blog.

How secure is your blog?

I appreciate that I may have caused a lot of concern and alarm by addressing this topic, and in part I apologise. But it's better to be educated and prepared than to be caught off guard and fighting fires.

Are you prepared for a data breach to your site? Do you have adequate measures in place to respond should a breach occur? Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you’re keen to find out more, have a look at these resources.

Introducing Rich Snippets

If you’re unfamiliar with Rich Snippets, it’s worth your time to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the concept. Essentially, Rich Snippets are the content summaries that accompany Google search results for your webpages when they pop up in the main listings.

Rich Snippets are incredibly important when it comes to ranking your content well in the new era that’s been wrought by Google’s Penguin update. The idea behind Rich Snippets is quite simple. However, implementing them in the real world can be a little trickier unless you know what you’re doing.

If you really want to wrap your head around Rich Snippets and dive in with both feet, Schema.org is the best place to get started. Ultimately, Rich Snippets are based on microdata, microformats, RDFa, and similar standards. All of these schemas are included within the HTML5 specification, which makes them easy to integrate into your websites. Both Google and Bing take these microformats and behind-the-scenes data structures into account when deciding how they’ll rank content.

How Rich Snippets factor in search

All geek talk aside, the entire point of Rich Snippets is to make your content easier to index for the major search engines. In that sense, it’s the same old story as before.

Microdata, microformats and Rich Snippets are roughly analogous to meta tags from the past decade. The reason why they’re becoming such a big deal is that search engines are looking to implement a more semantic approach to delivering web results. Keyword matching isn’t really the name of the game any more. Nowadays, actual meaning is far more important and software has evolved to reflect that.

If you’re a webmaster or site owner, you should relish the opportunities and challenges of Rich Snippets because they can actually favour the little guy in a number of ways. Due to their emphasis on actual content relevance, they can elevate your pages above those that are more reliant on deft niche keyword optimisation. Benefits include increased click-through rates, overall traffic, and conversions.

Let’s cut this Rich Snippet promotional tour short and get to the heart of the matter: implementing techniques that will give your blogs and websites a leg up on the competition.

Using Rich Snippets to stand apart

To make your web properties more appealing to the search engines, the first thing you should do is head over to the Google-sponsored Rich Snippets Testing Tool to do some research. Simply enter the URL of the page you’re focusing on and see the results roll in. The RSTT will analyse your content and suggest ways in which you can improve your pages to rank better using RDFa and microformat techniques.

Once you’ve gotten some feedback, you can start to modify back-end markup to address the problems you find. Tweaking markup is critical, because Google will look at how you semantically structure your layouts when deciding how to present a summation of your website in its results.

The cool thing about Rich Snippets is that they’ll allow Google to throw reviews, overall rankings of your website and more into the quick blurb that appears alongside your results in the SERPs. When people search for any given good or service online, something that has a 4- or 5-star ranking in the SERPs stands out more than a plain text description.

Implementing Snippets in the blog formula

The first thing you’ll probably want to do is get your author markup ready to go. This requires a Google+ account, some patience, and a little bit of coding knowledge (depending on the platform that you’re using).

It actually used to be much more difficult to get this up and running but Google now allows you to push this through a header tag. Instead of going into too much detail here I’ll just point you in the direction of Yoast who, for any WordPress junkies, will be making this nice and easy in the next release of his fantastic SEO plugin.

Real-world examples

As for practical advice when it comes to making Rich Snippets a part of your blogs, there’s no shortage of tutorials and examples online.

Google’s own Rich Snippets FAQ-style page should give you a good idea of how to get started. To begin with, you’ll need to pick a specific markup format for your snippets. Microdata is recommended, but RDFa will also work just fine. Once you’re ready to roll, you can leverage your knowledge of the latest HTML5 markup to get going.

Let’s say your website is heavily dependent on reviews—either from customers or data feeds. Well, Rich Snippets allow you to pull either individual or aggregate reviews into your search results listing. They can also be used to compile information about organisations, events, and products related to your website, to make your search result entries far more full-featured and descriptive.

If you’ve got quality content and a good information product, Rich Snippets can only help in pushing traffic in your direction. The primary consequence of the more highly-targeted traffic achievable via Rich Snippets will generally be a far higher conversion rate regardless of the type of website you happen to be running.

The last word

At the end of the day, Google's focus on Rich Snippets is comparable to Facebook’s efforts with Open Graph, the relationship mapping tool that allows for better analysis of the connections between people and their interests.

For Google, the end result of Rich Snippet usage is that users waste less time sifting through irrelevant search results to find what they need. For Facebook, the end result of Open Graph usage is that people are better paired with both potential friends and ads.

In any event, both technologies underscore the growing importance of semantics in search. Expect to see more intelligent, AI-like search strategies in the coming years as companies like Google and Facebook learn to better model the relationships between information and meaning.

Matt Beswick is a digital consultant based in the UK, specialising in SEO, and also runs Pet365. Find him on Twitter @mattbeswick.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

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