How To Make a WordPress Privacy Policy
Ever since Adsense updated their terms and conditions, requiring publishers to display a privacy policy on their website(s), webmasters and bloggers alike have been scrambling to comply with the new TOS. Fortunately for WordPress users, there is a quick and easy way to generate an Adsense-compliant privacy policy with just a few clicks.
Privacy Policy Plugin
The first step is to get the privacy policy plugin for WordPress. You can either install the plugin manually or with something like OneClick, an automatic plugin installer.
Configuring the Plugin
Once activated, you’ll be able to access the options page where you can configure the variables that will be displayed on your privacy policy. This will include the site name you want displayed, your e-mail address, and HTML formatting tags. More than likely these won’t have to be changed.
Below are checkboxes to display links to the authors site. If you feel appreciative of the author’s work, you should at least include a credit link – but these are all entirely optional.
Using the Plugin
On the same configuration page, at the very bottom, is a button that allows you to generate the privacy policy page automatically. You can also set up your privacy policy page manually by creating a page, and then using the <!– privacy-policy –> as a quick tag to display it.
Privacy Policy in Action
Once everything is configured, and your page is published, you should get a page similar to this:
Conclusion
If you use Adsense, it’s recommended you put a privacy policy page up one way or another. There’s also a manual Adsense privacy policy generator available for you non-WordPress users out there. According to the countdown on that page, there’s less than 24 days before the policy is put into effect.
That’s about it. Feel free to comment and share if you liked this guide. Subscribe to the feed for more Theme Lab updates.
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Awesome! Exactly what I needed. You don’t know of one for Terms of Service do you?
@sadcox: Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any plugins like this for terms of service.
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tnx for useful info
I’ve always just written mine up myself because I wanted to keep it from being in “legalese”.
Does this display the resulting policy as text or as an image?
Does the resulting policy contain any off-site links?
In just finding this post, I started looking at it to add privacy policies to my sites. I ended up finding a better one in the plug-in database that also offers policies for email, external links, DMCA policies as well as terms of use. You can either import their canned versions, or write your own. Then using a short code to display links to all your policies or individual short codes for each policy, you can insert them into your footer or wherever else you want in your theme.
The direct link to the author’s page for the plugin is http://offlinemarketingtools.com/plugins/wp-policies-plugin/ or you can find it by searching WP Policies in the wordpress plugin database.
Sorry for commenting on an old post, but seeing questions about the terms of service I figured I’d add my find in case others are just now finding it like I did earlier..
Thanks for the awesome site btw!