Well, not gone entirely. I’d better explain.
You may have heard about Google’s new interest-based advertising scheme, which has caused quite a lot of fuss. (Whenever data is collected about you it puts you at risk, regardless of whether or not such data is aggregated or “anonymized”. The risk might be made small by clever technologies, but it is never zero. Anyway; this is a topic for another time.)
Now, yesterday evening I received an email from Google AdSense, telling my that I would have to change my site’s privacy policies in order to reflect the new method of tracking people’s traffic. I know I don’t have any ads on the front page, but the thing is that I have a few AdSense modules on the old archive pages. That is, those pages that were written by hand back when this place was a webzine.
So deleted them. The archives, I mean.
They are still on my hard drive, of course. But rather than go through something like 200 individual HTML files to prize apart the content and the advertising in order to avoid having to change my privacy policy, I thought it would just be easier to remove the offending pages for the time being, until I get a chance to figure out how to re-integrate that content with the blog without messing with people’s privacy.
Incidentally, I’m not sure if this will do the trick, but Google does have a page that allows you to opt-out of their advertising cookies. But from the language, it might just be referring to the DoubleClick stuff, so I’m not sure if it applies to the new clickstream-watching stuff.
