wheresrhys

I read recently that mozilla have been making efforts to fix a bug whereby a website can find out which sites you’ve visited previously, which has implications for user privacy. On the same day I began to notice that there was something very sinister about… the google ads!

It’s a fairly innocuous ad, it would seem, but it occurred to me that the site I was looking at – the site I’m working on at the moment – had no content related to Javascript or web development at all. As I was at work i had, however been visiting umpteen javascript sites all morning. Surely Google wasn’t serving me ads based on my browsing history?

To test the theory I decided to visit a site all about puppies, and on my return, lo and behold, what did I see:

!!!

A bit of investigation led me to confirmation that Google do give publishers an option for their ads to

… display ads based on interest categories that might appeal to your users. For example, if a user browses many sports-related websites displaying AdSense ads or watches sports-related videos on YouTube, Google may associate a sports interest category with their cookie and show the user more sports-related ads.

I didn’t write about this immediately largely because I wasn’t sure how bothered by it I was. It’s very easy to rail against advertising on the internet as being too intrusive, but then again advertising does pay for the, largely free, internet. It’s always a trade-off.

Arguing by analogy would seem to shed light on the issue. Imagine, if you will, a magazine that showed you adverts about dog leads just after you walked your dog, showed you adverts for sky sports subscriptions just after you went to watch the football etc. Or billboards that magically change as you walk by to display ads you’re uniquely susceptible to. A bit of a dystopian image… but then again, technology often throws up moral dilemmas caused by the new possibilities it opens up and arguing that “in the old world it wouldn’t be OK” often makes down-sides seem bigger than they are. It would be sinister to be surrounded by morphing billboards… but that’s not what google ads are.

… but after a couple of weeks of being aware of what google are doing, and seeing the same adverts over and over again, no matter waht the content of the site I’m on, I can’t help but feel a few sinister overtones. In addition I can’t help feeling that Google are giving sites in their advertising network an unfair advantage. If a site about puppies is able to show people ads based on their past behaviour rather than the site’s content then they profit from google sharing (albeit indirectly) information about me that the puppy website, cute though it may be, has no right to use.

Yes, I know the boundaries are blurred. It’s not wholly dissimilar to when a magazine enlists market researchers to find out about its readers, and then uses this information to attract advertisers. And I know Google don’t pass on any data to the puppy website, and that no-one’s forcing anyone to click on ads. And that there’s an argument that more relevant advertising could even be a good thing for the consumer as well as the trader. But it still has a distinct whiff of unfair play about it. Insider trading. “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but something tells me your next visitor might click on an advert for shoes. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Click, click. Kerching”.

Google have taken a lot of flak lately about their lack of respect for users’ privacy when rolling out  Google Buzz. They’ve also been in the news over their fisticuffs with china and their publication of data of which governments have asked them for data/removal of data (I can’t decide if the fact they don’t publish the Chinese data due to the government there considering it to be a state secret undermines or reinforces its effectiveness). But it’s amazing what they can get away with that goes unnoticed.

To end on a positive note, visit this site to exempt yourself from Google’s ad-info-sharing cookies.

Now, go and watch The Birds.

*edit – it turns out this “behavioural advertising”, as it is known, is common practice across many ad suppliers and, somewhat cheekily, it’s an opt-out rather than an opt-in. To opt out of them all visit this site.