Website compliance
Copying a European cookie banner does not make you compliant: Switzerland has its own Data Protection Act, revised in 2023, with an extended duty to inform and penalties aimed at the responsible individual, not the company.
Who it is forSwiss online shops and brochure sites, agencies delivering sites to clients, self-employed people collecting addresses, businesses audited by a client or an insurer.
Order
The mandatory texts and the ones your customers expect, written for your actual activity, not copied from a European generator.
Understand
Who must identify themselves on a website?
Anyone offering goods or services online must clearly state their identity and contact address, including an email address. Omitting it falls under unfair competition, and it is the most frequent failing on Swiss websites.
Art. 3 para. 1 let. s UCA
Is a cookie banner required in Switzerland?
The law does not require prior consent as the European directive does, but it does require information: visitors must know which data is processed and why. A blocking banner copied from Europe is often ill-suited, and a site with no information at all is in breach.
Art. 19 FADP, art. 45c let. b TCA
What is the FADP duty to inform?
The controller must inform on collection: identity, purpose, recipients, and any disclosure abroad with the country. The privacy policy is the natural place for this, and it must reflect your actual tools, analytics and hosting included.
Art. 19 and 21 FADP
Who is penalised for a breach?
The Swiss particularity: the fine, up to CHF 250,000, falls on the responsible individual, not the company. That is what makes the exercise serious for a director, where the GDPR targets the company's turnover.
Art. 60 to 64 FADP
FAQ
Yes, if you target people in the European Union, both regimes apply together. We then draft texts that satisfy both, rather than a hybrid document satisfying neither.
If your company is based outside Switzerland and regularly processes data of people in Switzerland on a large scale, yes. We flag the exact obligation in the analysis.
It is a separate service, because it requires an inventory of your tools and data flows. It becomes mandatory above 250 employees, and is demanded contractually well below that.
Yes, in Word, PDF and clean HTML to paste, indicating which pages to place them on and where to link them from the footer and the checkout.
For twelve months, a change to your tools or to the law entitles you to a free update of the texts delivered. Just tell us what changed.
A question before ordering?
A brochure site, a shop, a form collecting addresses: describe your site here. Personal reply within two business days.
