How to add a privacy policy/statement to your Windows Store App

Under section 4 Windows 8 app certification requirements (Windows Store apps put the customer in control) is says that the app need a privacy statement if it is network capable. Just recently I saw some questions about this on Stackoverflowand after adding more and more to the answer I decided to just write up a blog post.

First of all you need to have a privacy policy, there are many online tools that can help you generate one, I’ll just recommend that you do a search and pick one or create one from the scratch, a very simple one would be privacy page generator. Haven’t used it myself, but feel free to leave feedback. Ginny Caugheyrecommended myapppolicy.com

The file needs to be hosted somewhere, and you have a few options, but they all have to be online:

Website
Azure website - Tim Heuer (as mentioned in one of the answers on the SO Q and A ) has a nice writeup on using Azure
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (thank you for the tip Tim)
A cloud drive - but the file has to be public and load fast. Maybe not the best way (a LOT can change there), but as far as I know and had it confirmed it is doable. I’ll make sure to edit this if this changes.

The user should be able to access the policy from two places:

Description page of your app
In the apps settings panel

For the first step, make sure you provide the url when you publish the app:

You also might want to leave a note to testers

To add the the policy to your settings page you need something along the line of:

[sourcecode language=“csharp”]
//Add at init: SettingsPane.GetForCurrentView().CommandsRequested += CommandsRequested;

private void CommandsRequested(SettingsPane sender, SettingsPaneCommandsRequestedEventArgs args)
{
args.Request.ApplicationCommands.Add(new SettingsCommand(“privacypolicy”, “Privacy policy”, GetPrivacyPolicyAsync));
}

private async void GetPrivacyPolicyAsync(IUICommand command)
{
await Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(new Uri(“my policy url”));
}
[/sourcecode]

What the policy should contain is how the users information is:

used
stored
secured
disclosed

as well as the :

amount of control they have
information will be accessed

How to add a privacy policy/statement to your Windows Store App

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