The New AdSense Privacy Policy
A few days ago, all AdSense publishers were presented with a new set of terms and conditions. If you don’t agree with the new terms, you’ll be booted out of the AdSense program at the end of May.
One of the changes to the terms and conditions that will affect all AdSense publishers is the new privacy policy requirement. Here’s what Google wants:
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws and that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
Most AdSense publishers are familiar with cookies, but the term web beacon may be new to you. A web beacon is also known as a “tracking pixel” — a small (usually 1 pixel high by 1 pixel wide) image that is inserted into the background of a web page. The beacon is the same color as the background (or is transparent) and hence invisible to the user. When the browser fetches the image, however, a web server can track some basic information about the user (IP address, any cookies, browser used, etc.). Beacons are generally used in HTML emails to track when and how many emails are read as part of an email broadcast.
To abide by the new rules, you are going to have to retrofit all your AdSense sites to include an appropriate privacy policy. It’s not hard to add a privacy policy, but if you have a lot of sites it will take some work to update them all. If you’ve built sites recently, chances are you already have a privacy policy in place, but it’s probably not comprehensive enough.
So what should your privacy policy look like? I’m going to help you do it quickly and easily — watch this space!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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7 Responses to “The New AdSense Privacy Policy”
Thank you, Eric, for this informative article.
Yes, it will be quite a demanding task to update all of my websites with this extra ‘Privacy Policy’ page.
I think you already knew this was coming.
As a satisfied customer and user of PLRSiteBuilder I can tell this, because every time I generate a new site, a Privacy Policy is included. Fast and easy.
In fact since the first Google ’slap’ back in July 2006, Google already wanted affiliates to provide a complete ‘minisite’ with all the necessary pages and easy navigation.
Most important: relevant information responding to what searchers are looking for. Many have seen their CPC increase tremendously. This resulted in many affiliates giving up the effort and quiting…
As long as we publishers do what Google asks, we can do nothing wrong and keep welcoming those checks.
Thank you for the profound explanation, I keep coming back to this valuable AdSense blog.
Thanks for the comment, Rudy. I will in fact be updating the privacy policy generated by PLRSiteBuilder shortly with a new release, so watch for that.
I’ve also got something cooking that will help others do this on their sites, watch this space…
Eric
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