I’ve had a couple AdWords reps point out the lack of a privacy policy as a potential hazard. We were able to successfully get some disapproved ads approved after adding a privacy policy.

Adding privacy pages in a lightbox is now standard for all of our AdWords landing pages. Since we also track pageviews on the privacy pages, I can tell you that VERY few people ever click it (less than 2 per thousand visitors).

That said, I don’t think it’s grounds for account bans but it certainly can’t hurt.

We have a privacy policy on our page and have been disapproved. The adwords policy no longer mentions a privacy policy as the remedy.

In regards to information harvesting, you have to differentiate between an “entire webite” and a landing page.

If you have landing page for ppc gathering information, and the rest of the website is about your business… no problem, Google do it themselves.

If your whole website is just one landing page gathering info, like Kyle’s, you’ll get banned.

There’s a big difference between a website and landing page, they are not the same. The website home page should never be a landing page.

Hope I make sense.

+1, this is an important distinction. Unfortunately the rules can be enforced inconsistently like with all of Google’s manual review (ad text, display ads, etc.)