Google weds you to its ad products
p2pnet news | Advertising:- Don’t look now, but Google is about to match you up with products to make life easier …
… for advertisers, that is. Not you.
It’s, “rolling out a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use,” says TechCrunch.
Looks harmless enough.
“The [deliberately, IOHO] unimaginatively named Google Profile will share information across all Google products, unifying often disparate Google systems that logins aside haven’t previously shared data with each other.”
Says butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-our-mouth Google:
A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products – it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.
Use multiple Google products? Soon your Google Profile will link up with these as well.
Gosh! Thanks! Won’t that be fun?
Look at the smiling faces. They can’t wait! 
But hold on a minute.
Are you a signed up Googler? And if you are, did you ever agree to have yourself and your data hooked up with products Google clients are advertising?
And shouldn’t, “will provide personalized information to each Google product you us” actually read, “will provide personalized information to the owners and/or advertisers of each Google product you use”?
Is this in any way akin to the Facebook effort when Zuckerberg, et al, tried, and failed, to follow its users around the Net so it’d know what they were up to, as well as where and when?
But at least, Google isn’t whispering in your ear.
Yet.
Also See:
TechCrunch – Google Starts Rolling Out Centralized Profiles, December 15, 2007
whispering in your ear – Sonic advertising privacy invasion, December 15, 2007
tried – Angry Facebook users rebel at privacy invasion, November 22, 2007
failed – Facebook caves to angry users, November 30, 2007
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December 17th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
“And shouldn’t, “will provide personalized information to each Google product you us” actually read, “will provide personalized information to the owners and/or advertisers of each Google product you use”?”
GOOGLE is the owner and/or advertiser of the google products people use… google products include blogger.com, google reader, google docs, google calendar, etc… these are the products your profile is tied to, not “products Google clients are advertising”, and yes you signed up for it when you signed up to use that product – it’s called having an account…
“Is this in any way akin to the Facebook effort when Zuckerberg, et al, tried, and failed, to follow its users around the Net so it’d know what they were up to, as well as where and when?”
no, it’s not akin to that at all… a) there is no involvement with 3rd party sites, b) there’s no mention of keeping track of what you do (although it’s well known that google keeps logs of what people do in google’s services/’products’) only what services/’products’ you use, and c) you’ll supposedly be able to share as much or as little as you want…
this basically means there’s going to be a page with my name on it that says i use blogger and reader and calendar and a bunch of other google services/’products’ if i so choose…
December 17th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
I use AltaVista to search.
December 19th, 2007 at 3:14 am
I use Google to search, and I have my web browser setup to dump all cookies when it closes. So as far as these internet scumbags…er…bussiness know, I’ve never been to their site before.
Oh, and since I run my own DNS server, I have all the major online advertisers blacklisted. When I do a query on ad.doubleclick.net, I get back NXDOMAIN instead of their real IP address, which is 65.205.8.152, 65.205.8.52, 216.73.87.74, etc…since they have a load balancer…