It is a constant challenge and has conflicting advice for budding marketers.  That includes you budding authors.

Do you put your real name, real address, real contact details on your webpages or do you take the precaution of not identifying yourself and your location in the interests of self-protection?

On this site I think you can tell which way I have gone but perhaps you might like to have an understanding of why.

My wife and I have been the recipients of an ongoing harassment campaign for the last 10 years.  The intensity has varied from almost none to what is happening right now, an absolute barrage.

Now this has nothing to do with the internet and we do know exactly who is behind it and there is nothing, legal, that we can do about it. We have recently changed our telephone line to a silent number, which meant we lost our phone line all together for several days and out internet connection for a week, might explain the lack of posts here.

Leaving the rest of that alone and returning to the actual original question.  Since we have experienced the potential for abuse when your personal information is available to a vindictive person how can I be certain that there is no other vindictive person online, no not you silly, some other person?

The answer is that I don’t know and nor does anyone else.

OK, given that there is some risk to put your details on your website how then do you demonstrate that you can be trusted to do business with online?

Google says that you need to have a Privacy Statement page, a Contact page and a Terms and Conditions page.  In business I have always said that a guarantee is only as good as the company offering it and mostly that means that they are not much good at all.  A 5 year warranty from a new company is pretty pointless, most new companies fail in the first 3 years.

What do you think?  Do those things give you confidence in a site?  If not what do you want to see to give you confidence?  What do you have on your site?