Take Out the AdSense Channel Details
As you've no doubt seen elsewhere, Google has started to include textual descriptions of the channel tracking IDs in the generated JavaScript for AdSense. This raises a number of privacy concerns for publishers. Since the channel IDs were private before, many publishers have used very descriptive names for the channels, names that all of a sudden they may not want exposed. If you're concerned by this new data exposure, my advice is to simply remove the offending line from the generated code. Yes, technically this would break the AdSense terms and conditions, but I can't see why they'd go after publishers who do this. After all, pre-existing AdSense code without the channel description is perfectly valid. I don't always go to the control panel to generate my code, after all, I often just copy over previously-generated code and make a few alterations by hand — with the end result always being valid, could-be-generated code. This situation is very similar.
Of course, most publishers probably use fairly innocent tracking IDs, so they may not care. There are already some privacy issues surrounding the publisher ID itself that if the search engines ever start searching JavaScript will make it very easy to link sites together that would otherwise be apparently unrelated. And if you use other ad programs like Chitika that expose plain-text tracking IDs then this is all old hat to you already.
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