Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress

Eric — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:58:32 +0000

At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.

Requirements

Self-hosted WordPress 2.0 or higher. You don’t actually need to be displaying AdSense ads, the privacy policy is generic enough to be used with most sites. If you collect any kind of personal information via a squeeze page, however, you’ll have to wait for an update to the plugin to handle those situations.

Installation

Installation is simple, as with most WordPress plugins. Download the privacy-policy-1.1.zip file and extract its contents into your blog’s wp-content/plugins folder. This will create a new privacy-policy subfolder containing the plugin. (The plugin doesn’t actually need to be in its own subfolder, but it’s recommended you place it there.) Go to the Plugins tab in your WordPress administration console and activate the plugin.

Usage

Once the plugin has been activated, go to the Options tag and click on Privacy Policy. Reasonable defaults will be selected for the privacy policy, but change them as appropriate and press the Update Options button to store the new settings.

Now create the privacy policy page for your site. The easiest way to do this is to press the Create Page button at the bottom of the options page. This creates a static page with the given title and slug (path) that displays a privacy policy based on the current settings.

Alternatively, you can simply insert a privacy policy onto an existing page using the special trigger text:

anywhere on the page. When the page is displayed, the trigger is replaced with the current privacy policy.

That’s it! Short and simple.

Future Plans

If there’s enough interest, I will add features to this plugin such as:

Support for different privacy policies (perhaps based on locale?)
Multi-lingual support
Squeeze pages
More configurability

Just leave a comment here and we can discuss it.

Updates

Version 1.1 (March 21, 2009): Updated the plugin to meet Google’s new AdSense privacy policy requirements. Just copy the new privacy-policy.php file over the old one and your privacy policy will be automatically updated.