It was a perfectly ordinary morning — until the legislator woke up and suddenly realized he had the perfect solution to the problems facing businesses in Israel.
"Here's the thing," the legislator explained to his wife over a late breakfast of pancakes, "self-employed people in Israel suffer from an excess of talent and an excess of time, and I've found a way to solve both problems at once."
"You're a genius, and it's a privilege to make you pancakes," his wife replied — and just like that, the new amendment to the Privacy Protection Law was set in motion.
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Privacy protection is undoubtedly important, but its primary use in practice will be as a tool for extorting small businesses that have no legal protection.
That's exactly what happened with the Accessibility Law, and that's exactly what will happen with the Privacy Protection Law.
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The owner of a large business doesn't worry about regulation — the legal department will implement whatever the law requires and will easily handle frivolous lawsuits and various extortion attempts.
Small and medium business owners don't have that luxury, and unfortunately, several of my clients have in recent years received emails with one purpose only: to intimidate the business owner using the law for financial gain.
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The law requires adding a banner to websites informing users that data is being collected about them, along with a link to the site's privacy policy page.
Although the law spells out in detail the penalties awaiting those who fail to comply, it provides no plugin to make embedding the required banner easy — even though a government-sponsored development would have cost almost nothing.
The plugins currently on the market are designed primarily for European compliance standards, leaving Israeli website owners without a solution, or with rather ugly solutions that don't match their site's design.
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Unfortunately, I can't prevent the extortion of well-meaning self-employed people who are just trying to make a living — but I have developed a WordPress plugin that simplifies the process of embedding the required notice at the bottom of a website.
The plugin lets you add text, a link to your privacy policy, and a close button, along with customization options for colors, banner size, and text size.
It isn't available yet in the WordPress plugin directory, but it can be installed as a ZIP file.
If it can help you, get in touch and I'll send you the installation file — it's free.