Google wary of personal profiling

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 1 Aug 2007 at 10:34

Google is shying away from the advertising industry's demands for greater profiling of its users, the company claims.

Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising, claims Google is shying away from the industry race to deliver tools for advertisers that stitch together a user's various online actions into one profile.

The world's web search leader has built its business around ads tied to words typed into its search box, which are expected to earn it upward of $16 billion in revenue this year.

In seeking patterns, Google's plans involve tracking the various words typed in a given search session, as opposed to building a deeper user profile over time. The latter is known broadly as behavioral targeting, which has long been seen by many as the Holy Grail of the online ad business, but inevitably raises issues about personal privacy.

"That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons," Wojcicki claims. "We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user's search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at. We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used."

At issue is not only users' sense of privacy, but the success of Google's existing business tying web searches to related ad links, she claims. Plus, the intentions of users can be elusive based on any given set of actions.

Google's planned acquisition of advertising tools supplier DoubleClick and the growing level of integration between its various services have raised concerns among privacy advocates over the potential to abuse its growing power.

Stringing searches together

Google has been testing for several weeks a new advertising feature that delivers ads based not simply on a specific search term, but also on the immediately previous search, she claims.

A user who types "Italy vacation" into a Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or cheap flights to Europe. Were the same user to subsequently search for "weather," Google will assume there is a link between "Italy vacation" and "weather" and deliver ads tied to local weather conditions in Italy.

While expanding beyond one-for-one correspondence between a consumer's web search and the ads displayed, Google says its ad targeting remains rooted in search activity rather than trying to deduce relationships from other sorts of user information.

The Google official stresses that this effort to improve ad relevancy does not involve personal information databases.

"What we are very careful about is traditional behavioral targeting," Wojcicki claims. "Nothing is stored, nothing is remembered. It all happens within that session."

The longtime Google executive says Google is hesitant about drawing too many conclusions about users from search terms.

Wojcicki highlights the problem of a user searching "video games." Advertisers might be wrong to assume the searcher was a gamer and not, say, a grandmother, looking for a gift for her grandson, she notes.