Google Behavioural Ads, Coming To Get You!

“We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies.”

Might be a bit sensationalist, but I like to think of it like this; would you let Google (or anyone for that matter) sit a CCTV camera in your house? Well you kind of already do! Except the CCTV camera is not in your house, its in your head! They track what are, essentially, your thoughts (your searches).

There is no legislation for what they can do with that data, they can do whatever they like, more or less.  Ok, so we can bear that because it offers us a service that is useful (search). But nonetheless, whether we are aware of it or not, we are compromising (giving away) our privacy by letting someone else track what we do.

This is a very bad idea, not for Google, but for us. This is the start of a longer term battle against privacy concerns on the web. The opt in/opt out nonsense is going to be (unfortunately) the major underpinning of many an argument over privacy, but it obscures the very real concern; what data is being collected?

“It’s ok”, the companies will say….. “we are”; (pick one)

• anonymising the data
• not collecting personal information
• not going to use the data for anything other than (insert reason here).

As with the Phorm fiasco and Tim Berners-Lee’s visit to the commons last week it highlights the problem at the rock face.

“We’ll track you personally, it’s OK cock, honest it is!, we’re a nice company guv’nah, we won’t lose your data, we wont abuse your trust (wink wink). Whistles and bells, whistles and bells…”
(Not an actual Phorm statement).

Opt out is like taking someones money without them really knowing, and saying “just ask for it back and i’ll give it to you, of course”. Except we are not dealing with money, we are dealing with a much more valuable commodity here, your privacy and freedom. We go to war over those issues don’t we?

The Marketeers Handbook (on you, specifically).

ALL marketeers want to know what we are thinking, so that they can sell us what we want. Not much of a problem really, we are mostly post modern, and used to it. But what about if you were a ruthless marketeer (do you know any?) and knew that a vulnerable group of people could be reached specifically and they would be very succeptable to targeted, psychological advertising? Would you exploit that chance? of course you would.

Now, currently, marketeers have very limited knowledge compared to what they _could_ have..

Google gives away a lot already via adsense, you could argue. But currently this does not follow you round the web. It does not track you personally, you opt in to giving away your details by using Google. But now, you opt in to google by using ANY site that google has a partnership with, which is a lot of sites.

Google puts another page in this marketeers handbook on you, specifically. Meaning, ultimately a marketeer that ‘wants’ you can just come and ‘get’ you. This isn’t that hard to do right now, so where does it end? Behavioural tracking on the internet in my book is akin to spying on someone in their home, it should be treated with the same seriousness, at least audited.

An example of the problem

Lets say Joe, 34 is having marital problems, he starts to search online for marital advice and looks for marital advice websites. What’s to stop Google serving dating ads at him continuously? With ads like “Marital problems?, we can help. Find someone now in your area.” it could be displayed completely counter to the advice that is being searched for or offered from the websites he is visiting. Let’s say he takes the bait and out of curiosity clicks on the ad, fills out his details in a form, that website now knows, from tracking, pretty much everything they need to know about him to exploit him further.

An example of ‘covert’ selling, as opposed to a doorstep salesman (overt), who, i’m sure if he asked about your “current emotional state”, whether you were having any “marital problems” and would you like to buy a dating subscription, would be told in no uncertain terms where to go. Why would we trust Google and not him?

Google have no control over this, its too granular a problem, to specific. This is only one case in point but there are thousands of other similar cases that could be drawn, from vulnerable, elderly, young, non web savvy people.

The sliding scale of facility

I see this as a sliding scale problem, on one end you have privacy, security and freedom of choice, the other end you have fraud, abuse of data and ease of use. Ease of use? well, anything that is easy to use is usually insecure. E.g. the Google search box, you just use it, but by using it you are ‘opting in’ with all your other data (i.p., cookie info, etc…) automatically. Imagine the Google homepage that had a checkbox for each bit of data that you could hide, it would seriously affect the use of the interface and the quality of result that Google could provide. A sliding scale widget that altered the number of pieces of information you sent to Google is an example of what I mean (but not what I am suggesting).

I hope that more people pick up on this fairly obvious point, servers that collect data should be audited in the same way as HMRC audit companies books. This is yet another case where the government should be hot to trot and step in. A privacy tax should be raised against all online and offline services that attract more than a million users a week, their servers should be audited for use of the information collected. Does this happen anywhere?

Hasn’t a lack of enforcement of regulation got us into trouble somewhere before? recently? financially? The signs for this are definately there.