For those that are not aware, if you use Google Adsense to monetize your site, you are required to have a transparent and available privacy policy for your users. Actually, its been a requirement since last year. Basically you need to ensure that visitors to your site know that users of your site may use cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. Recently, with the new changes to Google Adsense, and their Google Ad Preferences initiative, you need to modify your privacy policy. You should have received the below e-mail:

Hi,
We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

This is a required action to continue serving Adsense Ads on your site. Be warned Google does not offer a generic privacy policy for you to use, but you do need to ensure you have one in place by April 8th 2009. To make it easier on you, we offer the below privacy policy for your use, which should cover you in North America. It should be modified to integrate into other aspects of your site, including the type of data collected and how it is stored. Please note it is your responsibility to make sure it covers the laws in your state/country:

Personal Information Collected on this Website
No personally-identifiable information is collected on this website from persons that browse our website. The only personally-identifiable information collected on this website is gathered on our “contact us” pages, where fields are provided so that you can provide your name, email address and phone contact information. We collect this information so that we can respond to the comments that you send to us via that form.

Anonymous Information Collected on this Website
We record anonymous data. Most of the information that we collect from this website is anonymous information, such as the pages you visit. Other anonymous data we may collect might include the name of your internet service provider, the website that you used to link to our site, the websites that you visit from our site, and your IP address. The data is used for statistical purposes, but you, as the individual user, remain anonymous. We use this anonymous information to help improve the content of this site and to compile aggregate statistics about individuals using our site for internal market research purposes.

Cookies
We use cookies on this website. We use Google, as a third party advertising company to serve ads when you visit our website. Google a DoubleClick DART cookie to  serve ads to you based on visit to this sites and other sites on the Internet. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these Google, click here.

For more information about privacy and related terms read more at Network Advertising.