AdSense-friendly privacy policy sample for AdSense publishers to use
March 5, 2008
AdSense Optimization Boot Camp Tip #3
With the new AdSense terms & conditions changes made last week, one of the requirements is that all publishers have a posted privacy policy in place that advises visitors specifically about cookies and web beacons. Here is an AdSense-friendly version of a privacy policy that JenSense readers are welcome to use on their own sites. Obviously, replace ___.com with your own website name and/or URL. And you may need to tailor bits of it to suit your site - if your site targets a specific country, you can change the ISP and city examples with ones in your own country.
Privacy Policy for ____.com
The privacy of our visitors to ____.com is important to us.
At _____.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit _____.com, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.
Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.We also use third party advertisements on ____.com to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by <a href=”http://www.JenSense.com”>JenSense</a>
Don’t forget you now need to have a privacy policy on all your AdSense sites, this isn’t something that is optional, and when you agreed to the new terms, you agreed to do this too. I don’t know how strict they will be policing this new change to the terms, but it is always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to protecting your AdSense account. You don’t want a black mark against your account because you haven’t done this, I will be making the changes to all mine this week.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the JenSense feed for more great tips this month.
Posted in Google AdSense, Optimization Boot Camp
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March 6th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Thanks for that. It’s much appreciated. I was just wondering, though, whether or not that would apply to those of us who use blogger to host our blogs?
March 6th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Thank you so much for this!
March 6th, 2008 at 1:44 am
[…] de privacidad en cada uno de los sitios donde utilicemos este servicio de publicidad conxtextual, JenSense (experta en AdSense) creó un modelo y yo me tomé el trabajito de traducirlo -y modificarlo un […]
March 6th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Thanks Jenny
The Privacy policy is really appreciated and will also go on our sites this weekend
Dot and Dave
March 6th, 2008 at 2:45 am
I used this snippet. Hope it’s sufficient?!?!
We use Google AdSense cookies and/or web beacons are used to collect data in the ad serving process. You can remove the Google Adsense cookie by clearing the private data in your browser and changing your browser privacy settings to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:55 am
[…] So with the new terms and conditions at Google AdSense, you need a privacy policy on every site displaying AdSense. Thankfully JenSense has written up and released a general one for free. […]
March 6th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Jen, thanks for privacy policy.
Is there any definite deadline to implement this ???
Please reply…
March 6th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Jennifer, thanks for putting this on your site, small question though, yes it has to go on all sites showing adsense but could that be on the home page only or should it be on all pages which show adsense units?
Secondly I thought about doing a link from all my sites/pages to one single document which will be easy to change later if needs be.
I’d use a no-follow tag so that the search engines didn’t suddenly see all of my 20 sites link to a page which I’m frankly not sure where I’d locate.
The document would read “This is the Privacy Policy of the xxxx group of websites, one of which you just came from” etc…etc… and then somewhere close to that top line “please use your browsers back button to return to the previous page”
What do you think?
Thanks
Tony
March 6th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Thanks for posting this!
March 6th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Maria - for all intents and purposes, it needs to be implemented as soon as you agree to the new terms. However, I am sure publishers have a couple of weeks as a grace period to do it.
Tony - it doesn’t say specifically if it is a site-wide or homepage only option. But adding links to a privacy follow shouldn’t hurt anything at all, unless you maybe decide to add some mesothelioma keywords on your privacy policy page too! But I would be inclined to do it on each individual website, and not just one URL for a whole network, because there could be network crosslinking issues, depending on how you have it set up.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Thanks for posting this. It’s greatly appreciated.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Thank you, Jen. I have a bunch of privacy policies to update, and all my websites seem to need slightly different versions, so this is going to be a huge help.
I notice you don’t have anything on it about emails, that’s the main thing I’ll be adding to this template.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Hmm, Thanks for putting it up. I do not see a Privacy Policy on your blog yet!
March 6th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
As I understand, we must accept the conditions by May 28, 2008.
Jen, thank you for the guidelines and the permission to use your (appropriately changed) policy.
Jen, what do you think, should this policy be posted as a regular post and under a newly created category, or should a new page be created just for this?
March 7th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Jen;
Great post.
But if a blog is hosted by a third party who provides the log stats, I don’t read the new Google privacy page as requiring that you disclose that you have access to whatever the host provides in the log.
I am just a lawyer so I am probably wrong. But what do you see in the new policy that requires a disclosure of the ability to access the log?
March 7th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Michael - I would say that you still need it, as it is not just about logs, but also cookies and web beacons that Google gives to visitors of your site. As far as logs go, if you have any kind of analytics tool, or if your host provides you with any kind of stats (such as Webalizer or AWStats etc) that includes information in the logs, just not in the raw log text format.
Lana, for blogs, I would make a new page and then just link to it from your footer, that way people (including the Google checkers) can easily find it.
Nepal, I am getting there, am working on updating other sites first.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Ros, I had considered adding emails, but it wouldn’t apply to as many publishers, and it can often fall under the part about not selling personal information to third parties.
March 7th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Jena first time to your site thanks to a link from another site. I had previously read the policy changes. One thing I am unclear on is how a blogspot (Google blog) fits into taking responsibility for the privacy policy.
Our contract or agreement is with Google/Blogger.com because we are on their servers and we entered an agreement to place ads from their advertisers for revenue purposes.
The privacy policy (correct me if I am wrong) appears to relinquish Google and the advertisers from any and all responsibility should there be an issue with privacy invasion concerning visitors to our blogs, the end users—because they (Google’s Advertisers) place cookies.
We do not have control nor opportunity to choose advertisers as normal business websites would who have a first party legal agreement with their advertisers.
The language of the policy requires us to fulfill the public placement of the privacy policy for the end users with wording that clearly suggests we have such a relationship with the advertisers.
Google acknowledges me as an “Independent contractor” a business owner. But they have handed down the policy as if I am an employee governed by my Employer’s legal necessities.
Of course a choice to keep AdSense running on your site or not is given as you are logging in to your AdSense account and read the new TOS and Policy requirements.
For bloggers on Google Servers it would have been more appropriate for Google to integrate a viewing og the policy to the end user as they click on ads or make impressions on blog sites. They have a first person agreement with the advertisers we do not. They represent the advertisers to the blog publishers.
I am not saying I oppose instituting the policy. I’m 100% for it. My concern is that blog publishers unlike website owners who have control of the relationship and legal agreements they have with advertisers ie., Advertising departments and Attorneys are unprotected in all this.
Though it sounds as if this is a protective cushion for bloggers and it is, it also makes us solely responsible for all legal matters that could transpire about invasion of the end users privacy and who knows what else is lying layers deep should something go wrong.
So, though I am grateful for the updated TOS and policy I wonder what it is coming in the future for Blog publishers with Google blogs with such a legal layer being implemented. I’m sorry the comment is so long but its more question than comment and you seem to have a firm grip on the issue.
Thank you for sharing your expertise and the privacy policy language. I will be posting a link to your site if you don’t mind for others who may need it.
(I’m really tired, forgive me if I rambled. I can’t tell at this point.)
God bless
March 7th, 2008 at 7:38 am
[…] AdSense-friendly privacy policy sample for AdSense publishers to use, JenSense […]
March 7th, 2008 at 9:02 am
[…] run-down of the information about tracking and cookies that you need to disclose, along with a helpful privacy policy template. Please Digg, Stumble, bookmark or share this: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where […]
March 7th, 2008 at 11:25 am
thankx iwas just waiting for you to update.will post on my sites with some changes to it.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Vanessa - I don’t believe the intention is to screw bloggers, or anyone else for that matter. I think it is to keep the Google lawyers happy, so they are disclosing the Google cookies are being placed on sites using AdSense. Website owners are in the same position as bloggers if they use AdSense, being a blogger vs. website owner does not mean one gets to choose ads while the other doesn’t. It isn’t making those running AdSense on the site liable, it is simply having publishers disclose the cookies & web beacons if anyone ever wonders why they got a Google cookie from PublisherABC.com.
Basically, I think Google just wants to be able to say that they are disclosing the fact that web beacons and/or cookies could be used on third party sites (meaning all AdSense publisher sites).
The policy isn’t created to treat you as an employee… it is just part of being in the program, the same as how you agree that you won’t show ads on pr0n sites or agree you won’t contact the AdWords advertisers to have them advertise directly on your site and bypassing Google.
>> it would have been more appropriate for Google to integrate a viewing og the policy to the end user as they click on ads or make impressions on blog sites.
They wouldn’t do this as first, it would make for a very bad user experience for those visitors, and second, advertisers would be pretty upset about this kind of a change, especially when they pay for that initial click to go to the website and not a privacy policy page.
That said, I bet about 99.99999% of all web surfers never check the privacy policy on a general website they are surfing where they aren’t submitting personal information (such as an email address, birth date or phone number). And on sites where they are submitting personal info, I bet that number doesn’t change all that much either.
Long story short, this is a change so that if someone makes a fuss about “OMG, I was on ABCPublisherSite.com and I got a Google cookie!” it can be pointed out that ABCPublisherSite.com did actually point out that fact in the privacy policy. And the policy is identical whether you are on Google hosted Blogger or doing it yourself on a non-Google host.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Jena,
Thanks for answering my concerns and I do understand this affects all Internet users who access the world wide web and all who use Google services.
My reference to websites is for example, sites like the NY Times or Martha Stewart who have blogs incorporated into their domain ownership and use AdSense with other advertising in certain parts of their domain. They of course have other options for advertising and Advertising depts etc.
I like the AdSense program. I think it is the best ad program that exists taking all things into account. Obviously multiplied thousands of website owners and bloggers think so too because a great majority use the AdSense program. The legalities are necessary. Its business not personal and that was my point. Some publishers are not going to deal with this in business terms and others will opt for a one sided view when we need to consider it from other perspectives as well.
I truly appreciate the time you’ve taken to flesh this out for us and to listen and respond to concerns. Glad I found your site. Thanks.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
[…] put together a quick template of a privacy policy that should do the trick. Being that I prefer to automate everything I can, I threw together an […]
March 7th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Jen; I looked at the google policy again. I remain of the view that the appropriate privacy policy need not make a reference to log files - unless the user can somehow take an action to avoid showing up in the log.
My sense is that google wants us to tell the consumer of our blogs how to protect their privacy re cookies and beacons.
But anyone who wants to surf by-passing the server logs can do so via proxies. There is no need to disclose this, in my opinion.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
[…] Sample From Jensense Samples From Pinoymonytalk […]
March 8th, 2008 at 5:08 am
[…] put up a detailed explanation of the changes in the policy and now provides you with a standard template that you can […]
March 8th, 2008 at 9:48 am
[…] having a mandatory privacy policy — something I admittedly glossed over. Jensense has a sample template that you can use (which I did). If you haven’t created one, go ahead and use this one, because Adsense now requires you to […]
March 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am
[…] Thanks to Jen from Jensense, all my web-sites now have a privacy policy that complies with the new Google Adsense Terms and Conditions; however, if you’re responsible for multiple sites, implementing this policy could potentially take hours. Well today’s your lucky day because I took her basic policy and added some minor php tweeks to semi-automate the implementation process. This little bit of PHP wizardry drastically cut down on the amount of time I would have spent manually implementing the policy for each web-site. […]
March 8th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
[…] not onerous. Jennifer Slegg provides useful text in her AdSense-friendly privacy policy sample for AdSense publishers. The StayGoLinks policy can be seen from the link in the Footer of this […]
March 8th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
[…] Jensense: Trata-se de um blog sobre publicidade contextual. A Jennifer Slegg não publica muitos artigos, mas os que publica são sempre muito bons, como por exemplo, o artigo sobre o update da política de privacidade do Adsense. […]
March 8th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Thanks for putting this together. Note: protocol is misspelled.
March 8th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Whoops, typo is now fixed
March 9th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Thanks for the template. I used it on my blog.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Thank you for this jensense. I’ve been looking for the sample for some time.
March 9th, 2008 at 7:47 am
[…] If you are making money with Google AdSense and in the last days you logged in you Google AdSense account, you should see that they are presenting you the new terms and conditions. Before accept the new terms and conditions, be sure to read all the guidelines. Now to use Google AdSense program and avoid to be banned you need to place in every page a link to a privacy policy page, to advices visitors specially about cookies and web beacons. If you are lazy like me, JenSense published a privacy policy sample (click here for the sample). […]
March 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am
[…] you’d be in compliance with the new AdSense TOS. Honestly though, I used Jensense’s sample template to create with my own AdSense TOS-friendly Privacy Policy. The automatic Privacy Policy Generator was just too complicated for me to use. Jensense’s […]
March 10th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Thanks so much, Jenstar. I just found your site, and I think it is very helpful.
Rita
March 10th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Thanks so much - I have just copies this onto three blogs and two websites…..
March 10th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Thank you, JenSense, for providing this template. I will use it on all my sites. Your websites are very informative!
March 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am
[…] In addition, there are many templates out there to follow if you would rather go that route. A very good privacy policy template is available from JenSense. […]
March 13th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
[…] Slegg who is some kind of expert on Adsense. On her site JenSense.com she has so kindly created a cut and paste privacy policy for those of us lazy people to use. It took me less than 10 minutes to add the privacy policy to […]
March 14th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Many thanks for posting this. It’ll sure be a great help to many of us here. Thanks!
March 15th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Thanks for this, I accepted the terms and conditions without rally reding them and now I just realize everyone is talking about this but I didn’t have a clue of what to write!
I will “steal” yours and link to this post as soon as I have put it on my blogs.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
[…] Slegg of Jensense.com has written an Adsense friendly privacy policy sample and she is graciously sharing it with others. All you need to do is insert your site’s url […]
March 16th, 2008 at 7:57 am
[…] Slegg (aka Jensense) was generous enough to write up an Adsense-friendly privacy policy that you can copy and modify to fit your site. Thank you […]
March 16th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I am now in the process of updating all of my GA sites and thank you for helping to make this a little easier to deal with. I had been in forum discussions with many users who agreed to the new GA TOS without knowing this had changed. I still have to completely read through what I agreed to myself and am thankful that I printed it out before agreeing to it. Anyway, just wanted to say THANKS!
March 16th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
yeah a really good job , 10x
March 16th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I have been looking around trying to figure out if it is safe to put the no robots meta tag on the page that is your privacy policy. Obviously it doesn’t need to be fed PR and link juice, but at the same time Google needs to be able to find it. Any thoughts on this? Thanks.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Thans for making it easy for us. l too just read and accepted not knowing l have to do this. will copy and paste
March 19th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Many thanks for the template!
March 19th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I originally had some really simple privacy policy on only some of my sites and pages, but your template provides the continuity and covers the ground I need. It is absolutely great. Thanks, Jenstar, for doing this and allowing us the use of it.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Thanks. I didn’t even take the time to read it all the way so this is very helpful to me.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:55 am
You’re an absolute star. I was struggling to come up with a good one and this has saved the day!
March 21st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
[…] Ac
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Thank you very much for the template! I’ve used it on one of my sites already and will be putting it on more soon.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Sounds like setting up a page with this text would probably be a pretty good idea. Thanks, Jen!
March 24th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Hi Jen,
Do you know if google is going to picky about where the link to the privacy policy is?
March 24th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I don’t know if they would be picky about where it is, so long as it isn’t hidden away. Personally, I recommend in the footer across all pages, as that is the standard placement of a privacy policy.
March 25th, 2008 at 4:11 am
[…] Благодаря Jensense […]
March 25th, 2008 at 7:59 am
I could imagine this has something to do with latest announcement regarding IP and Privacy from the EU regulators.
What do you think?
March 25th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[…] found a ready-made Privacy Policy that you can use with just a few simple modifications to make it fit your needs. Very […]
March 27th, 2008 at 4:32 am
[…] to setup a Privacy Page but rest assured as Jennifer over at Jensense provides AdSense-friendly privacy policy sample for AdSense publishers to […]
March 28th, 2008 at 3:26 am
[…] dah ada privacy policy sendiri Taktau nak buat page untuk privacy policy? Jangan risau pegi sini. Copy paste sample tuh. - rujukan - […]
March 28th, 2008 at 5:10 am
Thanks for that. Very useful to know. Being a lazy git I will copy & paste the above and include that link back to your site
March 28th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Thanks i am using it in my Blog
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
[…] mentioned it and offered a privacy policy we could use. For people that don’t have SBI accounts, this site has a privacy policy they will let you use. And here is a pretty good explanation of the changes. […]
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 pm
If there making it mandatory then why don’t they provide one for us and explain!
April 13th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
[…] Make sure your Privacy Policy is updated, […]
April 14th, 2008 at 10:36 am
[…] you don’t want to write your own from scratch, Jensense has a template available that you may be interested […]
April 15th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Thanks for the privacy policy! The Privacy policy is really much appreciated!
April 16th, 2008 at 7:31 am
[…] posted a wonderful aid and I’d suggest you take a look. Jen also […]
April 16th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Nobody has answered the question about sites on Blogger……do we need to put the privacy policy?
April 20th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
This is a very useful thing to know, and I wonder when other online advertisers will expect the same thing. Will the intrepid Netrepreneur have to come up with a specific privacy policy for each and every one of them? That’s a whole lot of privacy policies, and it might be difficult to keep up . . . so, here’s wishing all my fellow intrepid Netrepreneurs out there in the cyber hinterlands who do not get sufficient wind on this in time the best of luck in the lawsuits that will just keep on piling up, making it a chore rather than a joy to get those online pesos. But such are the challenges on a daily basis for the hearty intrepid Nettrepreneur.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:29 am
[…] out of the loop as I am, we have a guardian angel: Jennifer Slegg at Jensense.com has developed a Privacy Policy template for […]
April 30th, 2008 at 6:14 am
[…] of your own. If you’re like me and just want to move on with life then simply head on over to Jensense and copy her […]
May 1st, 2008 at 7:19 am
What about Blogspot or Blogger blogs? How should we write a policy about it? Can anyone help or show any url in this regard?
May 5th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Hi, thanks Jens for that policy. I’m really appriciate it.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Thanks for the privacy policy. It really helps struggling newbies!