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.

About a year and a half ago I discovered a very addictive game Google were running called Image Labeler. You, and a randomly chosen other person playing the game simultaneously, were paired up and shown a series of images. for each image you had to keep typing in words to describe the image until one of yours matched your opponent’s, in which case you received some points; the more unusual/longer/less visual the word then in general you would get more points. I say opponent because although it’s the act of agreeing with them is what got you points, the game did generally involve a lot of mental castigation of your partner, e.g. “It’s a hat for chrissakes. Why on earth can’t you see it’s a hat. Just type in the word – H. A. T. What kind of a moron are you?!”… that sort of thing.

This surprisingly fun game had a purpose – to enable Google Images to tag images for searching, and the game is an ingenious way of doing so in my opinion (Google have long been known for genius programming, but devising Image Labeler took some impressive lateral thinking on their part).

I started writing this post as I presumed the game had finally borne visible fruit. It’s possible it’s been around for a while, but yesterday was the first time I noticed that Google Images now has options to filter by colour, by size and by a handful of key phrases (such as ‘photo’, ‘line drawing’).

On reflection, this may be almost wholly unrelated to the Image Labeler game – image size information has nothing to do with the game, and I reckon they probably have some colour detecting software to work out the prevalent colour in an image automatically.

But the game was, and still is, much fun.

Google have without a doubt been the breath-taking success of the internet age. Along with the innovation and financial success they have consistently been well-liked. Even people who caution against their rise as a possible big brother haven’t been able to deny that they are very good at what they do, delivering product after product that is very usable, demonstrating an Apple-like attention to detail and devoid of a desire to manipulate (adsense aside).

But recently I’ve noticed a handful of things that maybe demonstrate this is slipping:

Exhibit A – Being annoying

I signed up to Google tasks, a new Google labs project accessible via gmail. I can’t say I’ve made any use of it, but I am in fact likely to ditch it before I do as every time I visit gmail it flashes up a dialog box which

1. states the obvious
2. just won’t go away. Doesn’t even offer a “tick here to not show again” option
3. covers up the titles of about 5 or 6 emails

I can’t imagine the google of yesteryear letting anything so intrusive and persistently annoying slip through to even a labs product. It’s kinda, dare I say, evil.

*Edit – I’ve discovered that if you click on the Tasks link then the popup does go away, but it’s still annoying

Exhibit B – Repeated rebranding

This blog has pictures and dates to prove it. In summary, Google changed from having the recognizeable capital G, to having a nondescript lowercase g, to now having a barely legible, garish lowercase g. Big evil corporations engage in meaningless rebranding. Google doesn’t, surely!

Exhibit C – Holiday logos

This was supposed to be the nail in the coffin, proving that Google have lost their sense of fun as they don’t do as many logo variations on special occasions, but the jury’s actually still out on that one, as you can see from the figures below.

• 1999 – 2
• 2000 – 11
• 2001 – 11
• 2002 – 18
• 2003 – 15
• 2004 – 21
• 2005 – 17
• 2006 – 19
• 2007 – 16
• 2008 – 27
• 2009 – 4

If, like me, you subscribe to a number of web-related blogs in an effort to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of websites and the internet, you’ll have heard all the chatter about Chrome, Google’s new web browser. I reckon it sounds good in boring, but important, ways – more stable, faster javascript, ability for certain components to crash without crashing the whole browser. They say they’ve re-thought the web browser from scratch, and it seems they have addressed some important issues that maybe no-one else, committed to extant browsers, would have been able to – but from the point of view of allowing people to use the web in new and exciting ways it’s a bit of a dud. Firefox’s add-ons, and even IE8′s anticipated new features are far more innovative, flexible and of use to users.

One immediately obvious attempt by Google to break new user interface ground is the positioning of their tabs. All existing tabbed browsers (Safari is the example in the picture) put the tabs below the address bar. Chrome, on the other hand, puts them above.

This makes sense, as the address bar is the address of the web page in the tab – the address of the whole browser doesn’t actually make sense when a browser supports multiple tabs.

But does it make the browser easier to use? I think not (although one has to assume the people at Google have tested it thoroughly and found the opposite, or at least inconclusive evidence either way).

Often I open up numerous tabs for the sole reason of wanting to hop between them. In this situation I can imagine the address bar getting in the way, both physically (you have to move the mouse further to get from hovering over the page and clicking on the tab), and conceptually (In these days of super-doopa search, and long, dynamically generated URL’s a website’s URL doesn’t take on the de facto role of “page title” it once did. It could be argued that putting the address bar physically within the tab adds semantic clutter rather than information of high priority to the user. Putting it outside the tab makes it less of a distraction).

So to sum up, I think it’s a good example of when the logical, ideal way to set up a user interface doesn’t necessarily equate to the most ergonomic way.