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Comment by orangepurple | Hacker News Reader

No privacy policy and no terms of service might do it

What a sad state of affairs when even personal blogs are expected to be laden with legal documents.

I agree with the sentiment, but if a personal blog tracks users and sends data on them to someone else, as with GA, then it absolutely needs a privacy policy.

Why?

I had a blog and regularly commented on dozens of blogs from 2005-2015. Just about all of them used Google Analytics and in the early days many, including mine, were hosted on Google's Blogspot.

There wasn't any legalese on any of the smaller/medium sized ones and I really haven't once regretted that there wasn't.

Law.

Sure, and law varies greatly by region. China, North Korea, and to a degree, Russia have been extremely restrictive for a long time, western Europe has recently become more so and many other places are still relatively free.

My "why" question was intended from more of an ethical first principles standpoint than a legalistic one.

I know that some jurisdictions bury pretty much any online activity in mountains of regulatory requirements. That's not novel or interesting. As I said in the ancestor comment, it's "a sad state of affairs when even personal blogs are expected to be laden with legal documents".

It's not that hard to write "we keep none of your personal data" as your privacy policy, if you want to track me on a personal blog you better get your legal story straight...

That's the first time I'm hearing of suggestions that Google will downrank sites without it. Do you have a source?

It's only an ads thing. Facebook, Google, etc., all require to those pages be on a website to run ads. They say nothing about Personal websites, but the EU probably does once you start using GA.

My Facebook ad campaigns were repeatedly rejected until I made that one change. And they never said why it was being rejected. It was only that change that fixed it.

Unlikely to be a source but a good benchmark is to have this stuff in place because a)It takes almost no effort, b)You don't know if it makes a difference or not, and c)There is pretty much zero chance it's going to have a negative impact.

Definitely need a source.

I had a new website that had minimal text content. At first the most popular Google keywords were from privacy and terms! Had to change those pages to no robot.

Also intrigued as to whether this could be a cause. I'm certainly not opposed to adding one, but I'd be surprised if it was necessary. But I'm here to learn!

This is definitely not a thing.

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