Complying with privacy law in your Help Center

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A help centre collects data too: accounts, cookies, forms and comments. Four things worth checking.

One: the request form

Every field is data you collect from somebody who may not be a customer yet. Ask for what you need to answer them, and nothing you would struggle to justify.

This is the highest-volume collection point in most help centres and the least reviewed.

Two: what you add to the theme

Analytics, chat widgets and tracking added to a theme collect data from every visitor. That belongs in whatever consent arrangement your organisation uses on its other sites.

A help centre is frequently overlooked in that exercise because it is not thought of as a website.

Three: accounts and comments

If people can register or comment, you are holding names and email addresses and publishing what they wrote. Decide how long comments stay and what happens to them when somebody asks to be removed.

Four: linking to your own policies

Your privacy statement and terms should be reachable from the help centre, in the footer, in every language you publish in. That is a theme change and it takes ten minutes.

Restricted is not private

Content behind a sign-in is not visible to search engines and is visible to everybody who can sign in. That is a larger group than most people picture, particularly where registration is open.

Where the obligations come from

The law that applies depends on where you and your customers are. What is described here is what to look at; whether it is sufficient is a question for whoever owns compliance in your organisation.

If you want help mapping it to your setup, ask pluscloud support.

See also

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