I just read the following article http://www.adotas.com/2009/04/google-bans-publishers-for-not-updating-privacy-policies/ And I got confused. Google is banning users if they don't update their privacy policy? What needs to be in the privacy policy to prevent banning?
LanceT and anyone else interested I've got an update on my blog that tells you what you need to do: Google Adsense Privacy Policy Update Dean
I don't think they'll ban anyone for it.. it's just they suggest you to have a privacy policy on the website that will legally allow them to place a cookie on your visitors PC.
@gabibeowulfx - I don't want to frighten anybody but in theory they *could* ban you for it ( a warning is probably more likely initially ) as having an up-to-date privacy policy is a pre-requisite to comply with Google's TOS. To word it another way if you don't have one up to date you are breaking TOS which is something you agree to when you sign up as an Adsense publisher. Not intended to frighten anyone, just a heads up Dean
# Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our website. # Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our sites and other sites on the Internet. # Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy This what is neede to ad to your policy page of your website and blog. Yes they will ban you for not having it, i read that at another forum before the due date of april 8th
I spent about 10 hours installing this module (http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/) on all my WordPress blogs and am glad to have it over and not have to worry about Google banning me. Was no fun doing it but allowed me to work on a few other things during the process as well. Get it done now if you haven't already.
Folks, one thing you might want to consider for future updates is using a php include to update all your sites at once. Can be technically confusing but once in place it takes less than a minute to do your updates. This becomes a more worthy consideration if you have a lot of sites. Dean
Curious with fellow Blogger users - do you put a meta robots tag in your source code for your privacy policy to restrict it from being indexed in Google? If so, can anyone advise on how you would go about this with the specific code? By running a number of blogs I setup the initial post as a privacy policy, but am using pretty much the same privacy policy across several of my blogs and don't want the duplicate card being pulled. Cheers.