If i were to copy a privacy policy from another site (a really large site), made a few changes to fit my needs; would i be at risk of copyright or any other violations?
Possibly you could be, yes. It's not too difficult to knock up your own privact policy and/or use a template. Try a search for "privacy policy template" or similar and I'm sure you'd find something you could make use of there.
essentially I would just re-wright there policy using different sentence structures and rewording rendering the policy completely different. I just figured that privacy policies are mostly uniform and therefor are usually closely identical. also the companies practices towards privacy are the same as mine.
Technically speaking, the author of a privacy policy has the same rights as an author of any other work. However, most privacy policies (like most legal documents) have so little original content and have borrowed so heavily from other privacy policies that it is hard to imagine that a website would ever try to enforce a copyright in their privacy policy. Besides, a website would have a hard time proving any actual damages, since they don't sell their privacy policy and haven't lost any revenues by your copying, so they likely would be limited to minimum statutory damages. Despite the fact that you don't probably have much of a practical risk from copying a privacy policy, the better approach is to use a few different privacy policies as a starting point, selecting them from websites that have a similar focus to yours. Then, craft your own policy, taking only the features you need from each policy. You'll end up with a policy that is much more tuned to your own website and isn't a mere copy of any other website's policy.
The post above is correct and gives excellant advice. However, the bigger risk to just copying a Privacy Policy (PP) is that you will not understand the rights and obligations you have created for yourself. Just having a bunch of words on a page may look like a PP, but you must understand what is in your policy and undertake to practice what you preach! Do you have the security you promised? Do you protect the data in the proper way? Do you need to comply with Grahm, Ruddman or HIPPA regulations? Can you resell your data? - And More! These are all questions you need to ask and your PP needs to cover. Then once you have posted your Privacy Policy, you have a legal obligation to preform the tasks as you said you would. _________________ Andrew Jaffe Attorney at Law 330-666-5026 netlaws.us