Monday, February 14, 2011

I Didn't Realize this did you?

Alright guys, I recently found something that had me a bit concerned, and realized that it was putting my adsense account at risk. That something is a privacy policy. I hadn't realized I needed to make one of these, but it's listed clearly in the program policies.

Knowing this, I searched around, and got to finding some instructions and making a privacy policy, which you can all now see linked in the upper right corner of my blog. If you're using adsense, you *must* also have a privacy policy on your site, or risk getting a nice lifetime ban from the program. So, without further ado, here are those instructions:

1. Open my adsense policy from http://airsoftandwebengineering.blogspot.com/2009/09/privacy-of-our-visitors-to.html
2. Copy and paste it into notepad.
3. Search and replce my url and replace it with yours.
4. Create a new post on your blog and paste it in.
5. Go to the post options at the bottom of the post window.
6. Set the date and time to before your first post date - i went for 01/01/01 00:00.
7. Add a tag(label) called Privacy Policy (if you'd like...not 100% necessary)
8. Submit the post.
9. Navigate to your Privacy Policy and copy the URL

Now, you need to add a gadget on your blog, like you can see I did.

1. Go to the design tab on your dashboard
2. Edit Layout
3. Click "Add a Gadget" where you would like to place the box
4. Scroll down and select the "HTML/Javascript" Gadget
5. Give it an appropriate title
6. Link your privacy policy using the URL you copied earlier

Add the gadget, and you're done!

Hopefully this post will be helpful to many of you guys, as I can't imagine the frustration I'd feel if I got banned for not doing something as simple as this. The reason Google requires us to post this is because it actually violates US law if we don't, and that can turn around and bite them in the ass. They aren't willing to risk problems with the law just because us small fish don't bother posting a privacy policy. I hadn't known I needed one, but as should be apparent by now, I've added one. Adsense is a great program, that allows us bloggers to receive compensation for doing the writing we all enjoy. The least we can do is abide by the rules, and at the same time, insure our continued use of the program.

I hope this post helped you guys out. If you have any questions/comments, as always, let me know in the comments.

9 comments:

  1. Yup...very important that all of us bloggers implement this as soon as possible.

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  2. I've done this to cover my tracks, but I think Blogger has its own privacy policy that should cover us anyway.

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  3. Thanks for the info, wouldn't have known better otherwise.

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  4. Really? I thought about got some visitors recently and installed adsense as well, but never bothere, oh well, nevermind. Thanks a lot.

    Also, here's privacy policy generator for those who don't want to manually replace blog name http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/

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  5. Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for the info man

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  6. thanks for the info, my question is, it's mandatory even if we blog outside of the states?

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