Is the Google Toolbar a Trojan Horse for Ad Targetting?
(Ballmer Plays The Privacy Card): A Track for Erick Schonfeld's post on Techcrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/is-the-google-toolbar-a-trojan-horse-for-ad-targetting-ballmer-plays-the-privacy-card/
Author Kayembee
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Here is Erick's post... for the links just continue jogging. Take care... and thank Erick!
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/is-the-google-toolbar-a-trojan-horse-for-ad-targetting-ballmer-plays-the-privacy-card/
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Is Google getting ready to serve up display ads to people based on their Web surfing habits (as opposed to their Web searching habits)? Ever since the DoubelClick acquisition closed, industry watchers have been waiting to see how Google would dip its toes into behavioral ad targeting. One rumor going around is that Google is going to target ads to people who use the Google Toolbar, which is now bundled with Dell PCs.
http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html
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The rumor came to us via an online measurement startup that expects Google to make an announcement about a new service leveraging the Google Toolbar at the upcoming Audience Measurement 3.0 conference later this month, which Google is sponsoring.
http://www.thearf.org/assets/am-08
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[...] Now that Google’s age of innocence is over, competitors will be bringing up privacy concerns every chance they can. Google already collects so much data on what people do on the Web. With the increasingly widespread toolbar, though, Google gathers data well beyond the search bar.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/will-2008-be-googles-end-of-innocence/
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These are all hypothetical at this point. But there is nothing stopping Google from doing so. Per Google’s general privacy policy, it reserves the right to process “personal information” for the purpose of: Providing our products and services to users, including the display of customized content and advertising;
http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html
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And the separate Google Toolbar privacy policy doesn’t say anything specifically about not using the data it collects for advertising purposes. In fact, it notes that: Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them.
http://www.google.com/support/firefox/bin/static.py?page=privacy.html&
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But it also notes that users can disable the toolbar’s ability to collect personal data if they choose (presuming they can figure out how to do that). At the very least, Google has certainly thought about doing something like this. One patent issued last March describes a way of: tracking user behavior, determining a user topic interest (e.g., from a plurality of different candidate topics) based on the monitored behavior, and serving ads relevant to the determined user topic interest. Google did not respond to an email I sent asking whether it intends to use the Google Toolbar to target ads at users.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,346,606.PN.&OS=PN/7,346,606&RS=PN/7,346,606
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[...] When he says he is willing to pay users to give up their privacy, he is being literal. Who would you trust more with your privacy, Google or Microsoft? I’m not sure I trust either one.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/the-empire-strikes-back-our-analysis-of-microsoft-live-search-cashback/