Google’s Required Privacy Policy

If you have a self-hosted Wordpress 2.0 blog (or higher) and are on a quest to find a decent Wordpress privacy policy plugin (whew, what a mouthful), this plugin may be just what you are looking for.

A privacy policy gives your visitors a measure of comfort and lets them know exactly what to expect when visiting your blog. In early 2008, Google started enforcing their requirement that all Adsense publishers have a privacy policy in order to comply with the TOS of displaying Adsense ads. With the release of their new interest-based advertising on April 8, 2009, which will allow advertisers to display ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, an updated policy became required.

Eric Giguere from synclastic.com provides the perfect solution with his Privacy Policy plugin. His updated 1.1 version provides your visitors with the information about how Google collects information using cookies:

(i) tell users that this is happening and
(ii) tell them how to opt out

This download is not available from the Wordpress repository so you will have to go directly to http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/ and find it listed under the installation information.

However, before you rush off to do that, you should be aware that the most recent upgrade might conflict with other plugins you use, such as SI Captcha. Don’t fret though because we have the solution and it is free! Just download the zip file we have compiled below, read the “Readme” file, and upload the plugin files as you normally would. It adds all of the newly required Google info into the original version of the privacy policy and won’t conflict with Captcha.

Click here to download iBlogaholic’s custom version of Privacy Policy wordpress plugin.

Such a simple solution to the problem of creating a privacy policy on your blog!