Policy Breach Notice Google Adsense Email Notification

Dear Publisher,

We have now verified that we are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account(s) under your control.

Thank you for helping to resolve this matter.

Regards,

Only cool people share!

The Google Policy Team

Many people are receiving this email notification from Google and do not know what it is about. PII is an acronym for Personal Identification Information.  It is against Google Adsense policy to to pass information like that to Google. If your website is using the “GET” method instead of “POST” on forms then that could be causing the violation. If however you received an email like the block-quote above you have NOTHING to worry about.

The email is a little misleading and I think Google could of done a better job. In the subject field of the email it states “Policy Breach Notice“. No doubt a lot of publishers from Adsense freaked out then opened the email which was misleading in itself. Most people are wondering what PII is and some do not even realize that if you get an email like that above you are OK!

WHY AM I GETTING A POLICY BREACH EMAIL NOW IF I AM OK?

It seems like Google is just enforcing this now. Evidently it is becoming more of a problem for them. So the Google team are going onto these websites, inspecting them and then they need to mark it OK or send a different kind of email than that above. When they mark it OK then you are going to get an email like above.

What will a policy breach email look like if I need to take action?

If the Google team does find that you are in violation then you will receive an email like this;

Dear customer:
It has come to our attention that you are passing personally identifiable information (PII) to Google through your use of one or more of Google\’s advertising products — DFP, AdSense, and/or Doubleclick AdExchange.
Our systems have detected PII, including email addresses and/or passwords, being passed from each of the domain names below. We have also included below an example of an ad request that we received from your account (from which the PII detected has been redacted).
Our contracts and policies prohibit information being passed to us that we could use or recognize as PII. Sending us PII has put you in breach of those terms.
You should review your implementation of Google tags on your pages, including whether PII of any nature may feature in the URLs of such pages.
Please give this matter your immediate attention. You should submit your response in this form.
If you fail to achieve compliance with your contract within 30 days we may disable ad serving on your account(s). If you fail to submit any response within 14 days, access to your account will be suspended.
Domain names at issue:

 Here are some solutions to the Policy Breach that you can inspect on your websites.

These emails are warnings that were issued by Google following our detection of personally identifiable information (PII) being passed to us in ad requests from your sites or apps in breach of our policies on Identifying Users.
There are different ways in which this might occur. We recommend you start your investigation with the following steps:
– Check the URLs of pages where you’ve implemented Google ads to ensure they do not contain visitors’ usernames, passwords, email addresses, or other PII.
– If you’re using a Google product that allows you to add macros, such as the key-values feature of DFP, check that you’re not placing any information into these macros that Google would consider PII.
– If your site includes an HTML form, consider using the method=POST implementation instead of the method=GET implementation, which is more likely to pass PII to the URL.
This is not an exhaustive list, and you should remember that it is every publisher’s responsibility to ensure that it is not passing data to Google that Google could use or recognize as PII.
If you received an email on this issue, you should address the problem. Let us know when you’ve resolved the issue by marking “The problem has been fixed” on the form linked in the original violation email. In the meantime, you should mark “I acknowledge the alert, and I will investigate accordingly.” If you believe you were contacted in error, you should mark “I believe I was contacted in error. Please re-review my account.”
— The Google AdSense team

References and resources

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/ECHnm9Qf93U%5B1-25%5D

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/hZIFujT88JI/discussion%5B1-25%5D

Update Google Sends Apology Letter 🙂

Dear Publisher

Google recently sent you an email in English from publisher-policy-no-reply@google.com, with the subject of “policy breach notice,” regarding personally identifiable information.

The message was sent in error; we would like to convey our sincerest apologies for the alarm that this must have caused you and your colleagues.

You do not need to take specific action on this erroneous message however, due to the dynamic nature of publisher monetization we encourage you to periodically review our resources regarding PII.

As you know, our policies prohibit partners from sending us data that could be recognized or used by our systems as personally identifiable information. When we learn of violations, we notify the publisher and take swift action.

We know that you take user data and our program policies very seriously, and this message must have caught you off guard. For more information about the specific policies that govern passing PII to Google, and tips for continuing to keep your account compliant, please visit our help center.

Thank you,

Stephen, Amy, Geoff and Rebecca
Google Publisher Policy Team

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense or DoubleClick product or account.