Legal Research

How Do You Define “Interesting”?

In a post titled “Making ads more interesting“, Google today announced the launch of “interest-based” advertising:

“… as a beta test on our partner sites [those sites running AdSense advertisements] and on 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. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.”

In other words, Google will link a cookie on your PC to what they feel are your interests, based upon the pages you view. They’ll then dish up ads relevant to those interests, no matter what Websites you visit.

Stop hyperventilating. Take a deep breath. Google claims that they “will also not use sensitive interest categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories.”

Does this still creep you out? You can manage your ad preferences, opt-out of AdSense ad tracking, and even modify your browser to remember your opt-out status, even if you delete your cookies.

As the man said 10 years ago, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.“

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).