Any suggestions ?

Yeah, poppycock.

Simply coincidence.

Can I lose my adsense account for not including this in my privacy policy ?

Who knows ? I sure would like to see sites lose their account if they haven't updated it. But then again, there are lots of things I wish for.

Did you try disabling "Interest-based ads" and "third party ads". The second actually prevents "Google certified networks to target using third-party audience data they already have."

Simply coincidence.

Sure sounds like it to me. I doubt Google would even look at ones privacy policy all that often.

As a test, I removed the DART verbage from my privacy policy and BAM .. my CTR and revenue came back to normal.

Now I realize that the privacy policy verbage is mandatory, so I put some re-worded verbage into the privacy policy that explained the use of cookies and how to disable them in your browser. It seems that adsense approves my interpretation. My earnings / CTR immediately were cut in half again.

For the sake of discussion, let's assume for a second that bawhitney indeed sees this behaviour in his accounts. Overnight halfing of CTR is unusual and noticable.

The updated privacy policy allows 3rd party cookies, so Doubleclick ads are being served. Maybe these are highly irrelevant and just cheap ad fodder, so CTR tanks. Then the privacy policy is being reverted, and an algo decides that Doubleclick ads can not be served. Ads revert to being relevant again, and CTR reverts to old levels. I don't think such a scenario is very unlikely.

Problem is - what can we actually learn from this observation? We have not got options here: Not updating the privacy policy may result in a short-term boost but is against the Adsense TOS. Do you want to risk your account? What if Big Bro, er, Google decides they put a lifetime ban on you?

For a test I've just reworded mine to remove direct references to doubleclick. I'll let you know if my revenue doubles.

Google were not specific about how the privacy policy should be worded. That would make it difficult for them to identify wording and use the policy to trigger a switch. If they were going to do that they would likely have asked publishers to include certain specific wording that they could look for and validate.

PS - my own privacy policy essentially reads "the adverts are effectively separate web pages embedded on our pages. See google's privacy policy for privacy information relating to those adverts". I think that meets the Adsense TOS but don't blame me if it doesn't.

I'm continuing to test this situtation. I'll have more results in a couple of days.

Did you check your server logs? Did googlebot or any other IP checks your privacy policy?

Coincidence does not imply causality.

Couple of observations :

I changed my entire privacy policy to an image for 24 hours.. I figured that I would still be in compliance but the page could not be interpreted by a spider. This did nothing for my CTR (still about 50% less). I highly doubt that google is doing an OCR on the page to determine if I'm in compliance so I continue to test different situations in 24 hour intervals.

Also :

Last week, a friend of mine used my computer and signed in to his plentyoffish account.
Ever since he did this, I am getting POF ads on many sites that say "Hey plentyoffish user - Click here to sign on .. etc"

Even if I was a POF user :

Lets say I am researching a do-it-yourself site to find a way to build my own cabinet. I'm in "building a cabinet" mode and not currently interested in my POF account. Although google has determined that the ad is very relevant to my interests, the timing is very poor. I certainly don't need to click on an ad to sign onto POF. I need to know how to build a cabinet, and I need to know now.

Maybe just maybe, the DART cookie helps when a person is just "surfing around" and maybe not so well when they are in research mode.

Yes I know how to turn this off on my pc / or "Opt out".. I choose not to do this since I'm studying the behavior of the doubleclick dart cookie.

Well I said I would get back to you. My earnings doubled yesterday :-)

Reporting can be delayed so testing over short periods of time can be meaningless. Last week was unusually poor for me and I'm guessing some of the money missed during the week was credited yesterday.

Let me test this. I was always wondering why suddenly my adsense revenues are dropping. Now I will test this and have reworded my policy. Will test now the revenues again.

Let me test this.

How ?
You can't.

I was always wondering why suddenly my adsense revenues are dropping.

There are a 1000 reasons why your earnings drop, and a 1000 why they increase.

Now I will test this and have reworded my policy.

Your policy should have been updated months ago.

Will test now the revenues again.

Impossible to do.

For example... someone clicks on "Company X" advert and converts to a $1 click.
Later on in the same day another person clicks on the "Company X" advert, but this time converts to a 7c click.

How are you going to be able to state that it was the policy that caused it ? (when the policy hasn't even altered).