Google Moves Into ‘Behavioral Targeting’ Advertising
Privacy advocates are concerned over Google’s adoption of a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which presents ads to users based on their previous online activities, the New York Times reported.
Google will be the first major company to allow users to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting. Web surfers will also have the option of not participating in what it calls “interest-based advertising.”
While some privacy advocates praised Google’s decision to give users access to their profiles, others have stated the company must make more effort to notify people that they were being tracked.
Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology, believes more needs to be done on how to educate people and tell them how to opt out.
Behavioral targeting is one of the many techniques Google adopted from its integration of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company that it acquired last year.
DoubleClick is a service for advertisers and publishers to manage their ad campaigns. Google will use the service to further extend its advertising empire into display ads.
Google will track users as they visit one of the hundreds of thousands of sites that show ads through its AdSense program using cookie technology. Google will then assign those users to categories based on the content of the pages users view.
Such information will be used to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting.
Google plans to expand the program after first testing it with a few dozen advertisers. The approach could help advertisers find their audiences more easily and publishers to earn more from their sites. The company said users would also see ads that are more relevant to their interests.
Users will be segmented along 20 categories and nearly 600 subcategories, and would not create categories for certain “sensitive” interests, including race, religion, sexual orientation or certain types of financial or health concerns, Google said.
User cookies will not be associated with search data or with information from other Google services, like Gmail.
Google, however, will not notify users once the company has begun to show them ads based on their behavior, but those who click on the “Ads By Google” link will be sent to a site that explains the technique. They will also be able to access what Google calls the Ads Preferences Manager, to see and edit the ad categories adopted by their browser.
Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, said the company had to find some way to open the box to its users.
“Users don’t know how many entities pick up data. They don’t know what happens with it. And they don’t know why Cole Haan shows me a given ad. And even if they did know, they can’t control it,” she said.
Behavioral targeting could complicate Google’s relationship with Web publishers that use its advertising services, as many publishers are reluctant to hand over information about their users to Google if the company will in turn use it to help advertisers reach those users when they visit other sites.
However, the behavioral targeting system may let publishers get higher-priced ads.
Rob Norman, chief executive of GroupM Interaction, a unit of ad giant WPP, believes this further extends the schizophrenic nature of the relationship between Google and publishers.
Publishers do have the choice of opting out of the program.
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