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Creating About, Contact and Privacy Policy pages for a Google AdSense application

I 've discussed the process of making static pages previously. What follows is only related to decisions on the content of the About, Contact and Privacy Policy pages that are needed for the Google AdSense program.

Let's start with the About page.

When I set up the domain I ticked the privacy option to keep my details off WHOIS. So it would seem a bit silly to splatter a load of personal information back onto the web in an About Us page. Better to keep it short and generic then.

If Google would like me to have an About page what does Google's look like?

Our mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Well that is short and to the point. I'm not aiming for quite that level of coverage but in the first post on this blog I set out what I was about. Given that information, the following is suitably anodyne,

The world is too complex to be made difficult.

By relying on direct experience to help make tasks as straightforward as possible they can be tackled in simpler and quicker ways.

Let's make the world easier one step at a time.

Bland, I'll admit, but it covers all the bases and stops short of being a mission statement, shudder.

Next comes the Contact details page, which are e-mail only and therefore pretty straightforward. Previously I had set up an e-mail account on the domain specifically for the purpose of being the 'front of house' public-facing address for the site. I don't particularly want a flood of cold calls or junk mail that I have to deal with, but it is required and at least Google will screen most of the junk out of the blog's e-mail in-box. I was going to add a note that the blog isn't on any social media platforms but then remembered that Skull Cinema has a Wikipedia account, so I'd better add that for full disclosure.

Please feel free to leave comments with the articles. Should you wish to make direct contact regarding this site use the following e-mail
The account is monitored by a real, live person and someone will get back to you.

Social media

The blog isn't active on social media at the moment, but we are live on Wikipedia.

Skull Cinema user page

Finally we come to the Privacy Policy, this is going to be a lot of legalese, effectively unwritable (and mostly unreadable) by any normal person. There is no easy way to get through this and Google provides only sparse information on what they require to be present in the terms and conditions and with no example text.

Once you hit the web looking for an example privacy policy, your head starts to spin. In short there are quite a few privacy policy generators out there that will provide a document for a standard website for free but I couldn't find one that wanted to so do for a blog with Google AdSense. This is a reasonable place to start looking, although it is a bit out of date as quite a few of their 'free' options now charge.

To restate my position, I am not a going commercial concern; this is just a trial exploration of the AdSense system and there is no justification for the outlay of large amounts (or any amount really) of cash to garner a privacy policy. With that in mind, getting a lawyer to write one is definitively out of the window.

The next step down is a hosted customisable policy like the ones from iubenda.com. Using their service you can analyse your site and it will provide a live document that is regularly updated for a yearly fee that is about 3x the domain hosting cost.

A further rung down the ladder is a static customised document that is produced after filling out a series of web forms. There are a range of providers, but they all use the same web form and output the same text (see A/B/C/D; ?and are the same business) and provide a free policy…as long as you are not using AdSense. In this case they all charge a one off fee for service of about 3x the domain hosting cost again.

Another issue with both these offering is that the provider retains copyright to the agreement so you are not at liberty to re-use the content and there is nothing stopping them withdrawing the right to use it either (or I assume instituting extra fees for use).

The final option I found, from a single website, produces a generic GDPR-compliant policy without any copyright claims that is also free. However that generic-ness comes at the price of it not necessarily being specific for the individual user. However, it seemed that this policy would provide a good starting point and that with a little a lot of research it might be altered to suit.

It took me about a week to get a first draft together, first there was a lot of research on the web looking at the contents of the different policies out there along with some basic reading about GDPR, cookie policies, etc, etc. This was followed by a chunk of time trying to cobble together a policy for this websites' specific circumstances, ie a forwarded domain to Blogger that wants to use AdSense. The iubenda 'Scan your site' tool that was part of their policy generator app was very helpful in this regard as it will return a list of services that are active on the website. I also checked at Google Domains that no logs were being collected there. So with an idea as to what services were collecting personal data I put together a Privacy Notice for the site.

What can I say about the process? It was 'interesting' but on finishing it I was completely in agreement with Dr Gerlach, it's a Creative Commons project in waiting. It is also tempting to cut and paste one of the commercial policies from someone else's website, but as they are written by lawyers do you really want to tangle with them over copyright? Research is OK though…

So with all the pages that I thought I needed assembled and published on the blog it was back to AdSense,


I selected I confirm I've fixed the policy violations on http://skullcinema.com and hit re-Submit application. It checked the AdSense code was still on the site,


and we are back to We're reviewing your site again.


At a guess that's another 14 days until the results of the re-review are available.
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