Google is building
profiles of customers’ browsing habits so it can target them with
advertisements.
The search engine is
tracking the websites people visit to build up a database of
their interests.
Launching the system on Google’s blog, vice-president of Google
product management Susan Wojcicki, said, "Our advertisers and
publisher partners have been asking us for a long time to offer
interest-based advertising."
The service is running as a beta test on Google’s partner sites
and YouTube.
"These ads will associate categories of interest – say sports,
gardening, cars, pets – with your browser, based on the types of
sites you visit and the pages you view," Wojcicki said. "We may
then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text
and display ads."
She said Google might "infer" an interest in a topic from the
websites one might visit. "So if you visit an online sports store,
you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a
discount on running shoes during that store’s upcoming sale," she
said.
But Google users will also be able to edit the profiles Google
builds based on the website categories they visit. They will also
have the choice of opting out of the service.
Commenting on the launch, Cambridge University professor and
privacy activist
Richard Clayton, said,
"Google is not doing anything different today, compared with what
it was doing on Monday."
He said he would prefer that Google allowed users to opt-in
rather than opt-out.
The US
Federal Trade Commission has recommended that all
ad-serving programs should be opt-in. But privacy groups have
said the commission’s guidelines do not go far enough to protect
users’ privacy.