I was about to reply to someone about the privacy policy required by Adsense TOS, but decided to open a topic and have my say about it, hope you don't mind... A while ago there was much ado about the change of Adsense TOS, one of the big changes was that a site is required to have a privacy policy, covering the cookie and web-beacon issue. I see a lot of people who just don't seem to care, and that's fine by me, and it seems to be fine by Google too, for now at least. But here's the way I see it: First of all the TOS are covering a lot of stuff and I too find it sometimes difficult to check if your site is compliant, and it's very likely that your missing something which can cause your site to break TOS while not on purpose. However the privacy policy requirement is something you can't overlook, it's clearly stated and if you want to show adsense ads then you should have one, and maybe you won't be banned for not having one, but hey, if you're serious about making money with Adsense then you just can't risk losing your account over this. On the other hand, we know Google is covering itself through the TOS, but you should do too. Imagine this: Some stupid jack*ss sues Google for violation of his privacy, Google will have it covered by saying that it's the publishers responsibility, because it happened on the publishers site... Yep, you'll be faced with a lawsuit... and you'll lose it if you don't have the privacy policy. Far fetched, maybe... or maybe not... anyway I have them up on my sites. Comments welcome
I'm not sure about the liability aspect. That may very well be the case. And it's such a simple thing to include, there's no reason not to have it. A simple search finds numerous compliant versions of the privacy policy that it's a simple matter of copy and paste. If anything, anyone that doesn't have the will to include something as such perhaps should rethink having an online business with advertisements to begin with. There are rules to abide by, even on the Internet. Nice post.