New Google Adsense Privacy Policy Rules

If you are a niche marketer like me with your own niche site emporium the most likely you are using Adsense on these sites to generate revenue from the ads. What you must know is the for starters, you need to display a Privacy Policy on your site if you use Adsense ads.

This rule is to comply with Google’s rules and if you are caught with your pants down it could mean goodbye Adsense account. Interestingly enough I keep coming across many niche sites who fail to comply with this rule and to me that indicates that either these webmasters are not aware of the TOS of Google or else they are simply too slack to care.

A couple of days ago I received an email from Google to inform me of important new changes in their system. These changes directly influence us at the front.

This is the email text you need to pay notice to:

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”).  To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.
As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.
For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.
We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

***** end of email

For WordPress users, the privacy policy plugin has so far been sufficient enough to do the job but with the new changes I’m afraid we might need to reflect those stipulations from Google in the text of our Privacy Page.

If you have content websites created by a web designer software then you can check out the following page: the Free Privacy Policy Generator is a handy tool that helps webmasters get the message out. However, again I urge you to make sure to display the recent changes in regards to the email from Google.

April the 8th is the date by which you have to be ready for a visual inspection I guess.

Monika