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Internet Privacy Laws and High Risk Merchants

For high risk merchants, marketing to your customers online is an invaluable way to maintain streams of revenue for your business. Through the years, privacy laws for using the Internet for obtaining data about users has created guidelines about interacting with Internet users.

If you haven't implemented marketing techniques, online, knowing what you can and cannot do will be important for you to move forward with this project. Some common methods to consider are e-mail marketing and list-servs, social network sites, blogging, and personal web sites.

Social networking privacy has not really had a precedent, as Facebook's recent uproars over their privacy policy has shown. When Facebook changed their terms of service to claim ownership over any content uploaded or provided by users even when it was removed from users' profiles, thousands of Facebook members revolted and demanded the terms be changed. The power of the people reigned, and the privacy policy changed.

It is important to consider the democratizing effects the Internet has when implementing social networking. You open yourself up to criticism, so every effort should be made to deliver thoughtful and respectful messages. Depending on what type of high risk merchant you are, whether it be an adult merchant or a tobacco merchant account, you should evaluate what types of marketing make sense for the demographic you are trying to reach.

Many e-mail marketing campaigns use a small image to track information about users that open their messages. Many e-mail providers such as Gmail have provided ways to prevent these images from being downloaded, thus preventing the information from being transmitted. But there have been recent possibilities of legislation that would provide even more detailed protection for Internet users.

Representative Rick Boucher, the new Democratic chairman of the House subcommittee for telecommunications, technology and the Internet, has been looking to pass a bill to regulate the privacy of Internet users. Most sites already provide the opportunity to opt out of data collection, but the new bill would mandate explicit permission to share information with other companies.

Instead of having to un-check all the permissions, the default answer would be a no. Though this bill has not yet been passed, it is a characteristic of the changing administration and policies that high risk merchants and credit card processors should be aware of to remain within legal boundaries.

For high risk credit card processors, this news information would be important if information-sharing relationships exist. Sharing customers e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, etc. is a common practice for marketing research purposes. With the rise of SPAM laws and privacy issues among people, this practice is sometimes frowned on, so it is important to establish a way to find and contact potential customers without impinging on people's privacy.