Google has added a new line of code to the AdSense Code setup page. If you login to AdSense to copy and paste new revised code to your pages, you will see the new code. The old code still works, so there is no need to update your code (at least, not yet). JenSense has her thoughts on this from Sunday. For example, I have a channel named "Cartoon Barry", the date I generated the new code was on the 26th of September, 2006. You can see that Google inserted "//2006-09-26: Cartoon Barry" between the google_ad_type and google_ad_channel code.
google_ad_type = "text_image"; //2006-09-26: Cartoon Barry google_ad_channel ="3343792610";
So this tells people that the ad channel id 3343792610 is named by me as the Cartoon Barry channel.
We have to threads talking about this change, and some people are worried.
The difficulty for us is the severe paranoia Google have about telling us anything - even stuff as simple as this. Thanks to the paranoia at Googleplex this simple change will no doubt have all of the conspiracy theorists (including me :) ) running off at a tangent for a while. Whereas coming forward with information that clearly has no reason to be held secret would be a positive step.
One person thinks that this will lead to:
This it would seem, is a move by Google in preparing to perhaps hide Publisher IDs and perhaps require Publishers to indicate where they are displaying Ads......
Until we know more, speculation at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.