privacy statement Archives » Pinoy Money Talk

Brace yourself for a deluge of Privacy Policies now that Google Adsense has required all publishers to post Privacy Policies on their sites. In the latest batch of changes in their Terms and Conditions, Google now requires publishers to:

have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your usersâ€™ 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.

Google is here again playing God, dictating website owners what a site should have and how it should be managed. Nevertheless, this is for a good cause because sites really need to abide by certain privacy procedures especially at a time like now where personal privacy is shelved in exchange for profit.

So what really is a Privacy Policy?

Update March 23, 2009: The Privacy Policies shown here also abide by Google Adsense’s interest-based advertising (updates shown in red).

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Last week, Google Adsense updated their Terms and Conditions as well as their Program Policies and required all users to abide by the new rules. Did you just click on the “Agree” button without actually reading what you are agreeing on?

That’s ok, a majority of Adsense publishers did exactly that. But you need to be aware of what Adsense now requires of you, because if they discovered that you are not following the new policies, you might be kicked out of the Adsense program without receiving any of your due earnings.

Jensense made a detailed analysis of the changes in Adsense’s terms and conditions, but the most important change of all is that Google now requires publishers to:

have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy 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.

What this means is that your site must now include a Privacy Policy that (1) explicitly tells visitors that third parties (like Google Adsense) may place cookies on the visitor’s browser in the course of serving ads to them; and (2) mentions user options for cookie management, for example, what they should do if they don’t want to accept cookies or want to remove them.

I’m sure around 99% of all bloggers who have Adsense are guilty of not having a Privacy Statement. With this new Adsense rule, you are now required to have one. Don’t fret! There are a lot of free privacy policy statements online that you can use for your site. Simply customize them so that it fits your site and make sure it includes the two things that the new Adsense policy requires.

Here are some of the privacy policy templates that you can use.