A Privacy Issue for Google AdSense

Google AdSense allows readers to gain the Publisher ID through viewing web page's source code in HTML. This may lead to privacy leaking to some degree.

Here is a case to show how people can explore such public available information. Blog site blog.dwnews.com is a popular political forum amongst overseas Chinese communities. The owner of this forum tries to create a forum without bias and welcomes people having different options to debate in the forum. As the result, the debates are always so ferocious between groups of pro-democracy and pro- Chinese Government. In aims to avoid the possible trouble with Chinese Government, many bloggers are anonymous there.

One blogger through Google AdSense' publisher ID found out several popular blogs were actually run by a same person, or presumably the same person because the AdSense Publisher IDs for these blogs are the same. He attached accordingly based on his finding, followed by a series of incidents. At the end of it, one of them declared he leaves the site permanently, and the account of the other one, ranked number one in current activities, had been cancelled by the webmaster. What lucky here is, both of them did not reside in China and we did not see someone ends up in the jail.

That was in June 2009, two months ago.