March 11, 2009 Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests By MIGUEL HELFTSAN FRANCISCO -- Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.
Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting. Like rivals such as Yahoo, it also will give users the choice to opt out from what it calls "interest-based advertising."
Privacy advocates praised Google's decision to give users access to their profiles.
Given Google's position as the No. 1 seller of online ads, its approach is likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit. Online advertising industry groups said it might help quell calls for government regulation.
But the privacy advocates also said Google needed to do more to notify people that they were being tracked.
"We think more needs to be done on how to educate people and tell them how to opt out," said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Google's foray into behavioral targeting may represent the most visible result so far of the company's integration of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company that it acquired a year ago. Google bought DoubleClick, which is used by advertisers and publishers to manage their ad campaigns, to extend its advertising empire into display ads, which it sees as the next best hope to reignite its growth.
Google will use a cookie, a small piece of text that resides inside a Web browser, to track users as they visit one of the hundreds of thousands of sites that show ads through its AdSense program. Google will assign those users to categories based on the content of the pages they visit. For example, a user may be pegged as a potential car buyer, sports enthusiast or expectant mother.
Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting. An expectant mother may see an ad about baby products not only on a parenting site but also, for example, on a sports or fashion site that uses AdSense or on YouTube, which is owned by Google. ...
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A book in progress by
Siva Vaidhyanathan
This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google's ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states? [more]
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Comments (1)
Google is recording the web surfing behavior of everyone who happens on a site that uses AdSense or DoubleClick. Their new doubleclick.net cookie has a unique ID and is similar to the same sophisticated system that was developed over the last ten years for the google.com cookie.
Many major sites use AdSense. It took me a minute to find AdSense on newyorktimes.com, reuters.com, bloomberg.com, and cnn.com, and then I stopped looking because my suspicions were already confirmed. Even apart from AdSense, DoubleClick ads are all over the web. Unless you disable JavaScript, which makes surfing inconvenient on many sites and impossible on some, you are being thoroughly tracked.
This tracking is a major move on Google's part. The referral from the phone-home to doubleclick.net contains the complete URL of the page you are viewing, in the same instant that your browser offers up the unique ID from your cookie. Google can add a time stamp, plus your IP address. And knowing Google, they will.
While Google says that it is dicing this information so that it can merely stick you into a number of broad interest categories, we have to assume that Google is saving all of the information they collect. It would not make sense to identify the relevant categories on the fly and then throw away the details. That would preclude future development into a more finely-grained system. Yes, we have to assume that Google saves everything, until such time that Google allows auditors into the Googleplex and the auditors say otherwise.
Google is asking webmasters who use AdSense, to update their privacy policies to reflect this new tracking behavior. This in itself provides an opportunity to focus attention on the issue. See http://www.scroogle.org/adsense.html
The biggest issue that ought to evolve out of this latest development is the issue of opt-in vs. opt-out. This new tracking should be opt-in, but Google is falling all over itself to make sure it stays opt-out. My guess is that opt-in might allow tracking of less than two percent of the activity that the current opt-out system will allow. How many people even know what a cookie is? What percentage know how to configure the cookie options on their browsers? If they delete their cookies just one time after opting out, will they remember that they also deleted their opt-out cookie, and that Google's tracking resumes?
If this new Google initiative remains opt-out the way it is now, the FTC should require all pages that display "Ads by Google" to intercept the page with a prominent announcement that allows a simple opt-out click for that page. But that's extremely clumsy and would crush AdSense altogether. Opt-in is the only reasonable alternative.