DISABLE THIS GOOGLE SETTING

And stop your NAME being used in adverts

Google can now show you adverts based on your name following a highly controversial change to its privacy policy.

The company is letting Doubleclick, an online advertising company it bought in 2007, create adverts based on information Google users have entered in Gmail, Youtube and other services it runs.

Doubleclick tracks your web browsing to show you adverts it thinks will interest you. For example, if you visit a page for a product on Amazon, you may subsequently see adverts for it on other sites.

To show these adverts Doubleclick needs to track the sites you visit, but doesn’t require your personal details. However, now that it has access to this data, it will be able to show you adverts that are better targeted to your tastes and interests.

Google altered its privacy popolicy in June, but it took four months for anyone to notice. That honour fell to US news website Propublica, which noticed that Google had crossed out the part of its policy that prevents it from combining Doubleclick data with “personally identifiable information” (see screenshot).

In its place Google stated: “Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads delivered by Google”.

It means that Google could in theory build a complete portrait of a user, comprising their name, what they write in Gmail, everything they search for, and every website they visit. The only way to block this is to disable a privacy setting (see box left). View Google’s privacy policy at www.snipca.com/22278.