AdSense and publisher privacy

Some of my readers are concerned about privacy issues with regards to their sites. The most obvious issue is the domain name, of course, since the information about who owns a domain is public and easily checked using free services like CheckDomain or your own registrar's “whois” information. Even Alexa shows this information by default, though there are ways to purge it from their systems. For the privacy conscious, most domain registrars offer “private” registrations as an option for a fee.

AdSense publishers, however, face an additional privacy concern: the publisher ID embedded in their AdSense code. Look closely at the code that Google generates for you, the first item is your publisher ID:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-5964030199537728";
google_ad_width = 728;
.... // etc. etc.

The publisher ID is unique to each AdSense account, and each person/entity is normally only allowed a single AdSense account. Thus you can reasonably assume that two different sites using the same AdSense publisher ID are related and probably owned by the same person/entity. Each site must therefore take measures to protect that privacy.

Luckily, the publisher ID is embedded inside an HTML comment, which means it doesn't actually get indexed by the major search engines. So you can't just go to Google and type in the AdSense publisher ID to get a list of related sites. Not yet, anyhow. You have to do things manually. Or maybe someone will create and distribute a Firefox plug-in that logs all publisher IDs it finds into a public database, kind of a brute-force approach.

If privacy is really important and you have concerns about associating your sites with each other — perhaps one of them is very controversial — then you may be able to petition Google to get a second AdSense account. But I think that's very hard to do. Probably the best solution is to create a separate legal entity (a new corporation) to actually own the account, but that brings additional costs and paperwork headaches.

Something to think about.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real introductory AdSense book for non-technical people. Be sure to download the free sample chapter.

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