“Swine flu hits laptop!”

 Hopefully this will not ever be the case, but there are viruses out there that love computers. You may have installed all the virus guards and firewalls you think are necessary, but what about the websites you link to? In the current economic climate, people’s tendency is naturally to network like mad and, in order to raise their profile on the net, to link to other websites and get others to link back to them. But what protection do those websites have?

From a legal point of view, if you link to other websites without warning your customers, it is the same as passing them on to complete strangers. Your customers risk not only down loading unknown viruses from the other website, but they may fill in forms with their personal  and credit card details. This data may be passed on to marketing agencies, friends & family, anybody!

If one of your customers becomes “infected” through one of your links or finds they are being spammed from one of your links, they may well come back to YOU and ask for compensation. This is the case especially if the link is embedded in your site and customers are not necessarily aware they are even leaving your site. Do you have terms of use on your website that cover you in such situations and state you are not liable? Do you ever check out other sites before you link to them? Would love to hear from you.