Google’s plan to target advertising is creepy
Company wants to link online behavior to offline shopping
On Tuesday, KCBS coanchors Jeff Bell and Patti Reising and I talked about Google’s new plan to track brick-and-mortar transactions with online behavior during my daily live radio segment. But before I started explaining the plan, Patti began by saying, “Larry this sounds creepy to me.” And even after I explained Google’s claim that the data is purely aggregate and not associated with any individuals, she still found it creepy. And she was right. Regardless of how well Google encrypts and anonymizes data, any linkages between consumers’ online and offline behaviors will creep people out.
Lots of people are already creeped out when they see ads on third-party sites associated with a previous search either on a seemingly random webpage or an e-commerce site such as Amazon. We’ve all seen these ads pop up on Facebook, in Google searches or other sites we visit, and may have been creeped out by the fact that they are displaying ads for the very products we searched for on Google, Amazon or other sites. It’s especially creepy when the ad appears on a site that doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the site that actually gathered your information.
There are several ways that advertisers can track you online. One, of course, is if you’re logged in. So if you’re shopping on Amazon, the company knows who you are. Google also encourages users to log in, which allows it to know where you’ve been on Google sites. And Facebook always knows who you are when you’re logged in to its site or using its app. But even if you’re not logged in, there are tracking cookies — little files that are placed on your device’s storage to track where you have been. In addition to first-party cookies that store information, like user names and passwords, there are third-party cookies that can be placed by someone other than the site you are on, such as advertising networks or analytics companies that have partnered with the site you’re visiting. There are also Flash cookies that work with Adobe Flash player for tracking and advertising. Another trick is “device fingerprinting,” which can identify your device or browser without the use of cookies, regardless of whether you’re on a PC, a phone or another device. Another tool is the HTTP referrer, where the website you’re on passes your information to the next site you visit. You can learn more about how to identify and control tracking at larrysworld. com/tracking.
It may actually get worse because the FCC recently voted to allow internet service providers to sell your data, which means any site you visit is fair game since ISPs can know everything you do and everywhere you go when you’re on their network. Most internet service providers have privacy policies that limit how they use personal data, but any legal obstacles to disclosing it are diminishing.
Regardless of whether the information being collected or even displayed can be tracked back to an individual, it can still be creepy. For example, a few years ago, a friend told me she saw an ad on Facebook directed specifically to “50-year-old women in Palo Alto” and wondered how the advertiser knew her age and location. It didn’t, but Facebook does. Facebook didn’t sell this woman’s information to the advertiser. Instead, it did something that’s a lot more profitable in the long run. It kept that information to itself but sold the demographic by displaying that ad on the Facebook page of anyone who met whatever criteria the advertiser specified. Aside from not violating Facebook’s privacy policy, it also gives Facebook a big financial advantage because it means that the advertiser will have to pay Facebook each time it wants to reach those users.
When I explained this to my friend, she was relieved to know that her information wasn’t sold, but she still found it creepy to log on to Facebook and find an ad that mentioned her age, gender and location.
Google’s new online and offline matching service for advertisers helps brickand-mortar businesses know whether people who click on their online ads are actually shopping at their stores by matching credit and debit card transactions with online behavior. Google says that the data is encrypted and anonymized and that even Google can’t see any personally identifiable data or payment information. Google says that the data is presented in aggregate form so that both Google and the advertiser could, for example, know how many people who clicked on their ad wound up buying something from the store.
“While we developed the concept for this product years ago, it required years of effort to develop a solution that could meet our stringent user privacy requirements,” a Google spokesperson said. “To accomplish this, we developed a new, custom encryption technology that ensures users’ data remains private, secure and anonymous.”
The spokesperson also said that “Google only learns of the aggregate value over multiple purchases, not individual transactions or individual products or who the individual person is. Also, we only measure for users who have consented for Web and App History. They have the option to make changes to this setting using the My Accounts page.”
For advertisers, Google’s plan means better insight into the effectiveness of their online campaigns. For Google, it’s a great marketing tool because it can point to its successes when selling ads. For the rest of us, as my colleague Patti said, it’s just plain creepy.
Targeted advertising isn’t going away. It’s the fuel that monetizes all of the free online services we’ve come to rely on, and without targeted ads many of these services would lose money or at least operate at a smaller profit. Personally, I prefer the old advertising model used in print, TV and radio where the advertiser knows something about the type of person who reads or tunes in but nothing about that person’s habits. But that type of advertising doesn’t bring in as much money as ads that are targeted and even ads don’t necessarily generate as much money as data about the individuals visiting sites and using apps.
So having to deal with sharing out data may be the price we must pay for all the free services we get online, but I sure hope we find ways way to make it more transparent, more controllable and a lot less creepy.