Last week Google announced it was “simplifying and updating” its privacy policies. As it so often does, the announcement was framed as a `we did for your good’ kind of effort. “[W]e want to make our policies more transparent and understandable,” it explained, noting that “most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.” But as so often with Google and other online marketers, you have to both read between the digital lines and also analyze what’s really going on.
Google’s revised policy, which takes effect October 3, fails to really explain to consumers/users what’s actually going on. Like other privacy policies, Google claims that all its data collection is to “provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.” But what they really mean–and what the Congress, the FTC and other regulators must require them to disclose–is that they have crafted a wide-ranging system designed to foster personalized data collection and online targeting. Missing from the revised Privacy Policy (which Google, btw, is pitching to privacy advocates and no doubt others as a paragon of digital virtue) is any candid disclosure on how its Doubleclick, Admob, Google Display Network, Ad Exchange, Teracent, and other services collect information from and about us.
Google isn’t alone–Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and everyone else rely on a purposefully deceptive privacy policy to engage in data collection activities that require disclosure and individual user control. Google is also reshaping its privacy policy to better capture all the data it can collect across multiple platforms and applications. Here, just for the record, is what Google advertised in Ad Age’s recent Ad Exchange and online advertising guide [excerpt]: No matter how you define performance, the Google Display Network offers a solution. By bringing more measurability and precision to your advertising, it enables you to create, target and optimize ads based on real-time data, meaning better returns for you.
The Google Display Network helps advertisers and agencies achieve performance at scale by delivering relevant, accountable ads to their target audiences—in more places, more often…Precisely target your audience: The Google Display Network’s technology enables you to find customers based on their interests, sites they visit and when they’re engaging with relevant content via contextual targeting, or show specific messages to users who’ve already visited your site with remarketing…The Google Display Network provides opportunities to advertise in all such environments—feeds, games, mobile, social networks and video streams— enabling you to create an immersive experience for your audience.
PS. Well, Google just also announced what its interactive display ad system can do for marketers. How come this isn’t in the privacy policy in understandable language and full consumer control? Excerpt: Advertising with Google used to be all about four lines of text, on Google.com and on our partner sites. No longer. Did you know that, outside of ads alongside search results, more than 40 percent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads? And that doesn’t include the 45 billion ads that our DoubleClick advertising products serve every day across the web.
We get excited by display advertising for a number of reasons…Teracent’s technology can automatically tailor and select the creative elements in an ad, and adjust them based on location, language, weather and even the past performance of ads, to show the optimal ad. We’re focused on helping advertisers get the best results from their campaigns—by enabling creative branding campaigns, precise targeting, wide reach and effective measurement. Over recent years, we’ve added a ton of new features to YouTube and the Google Display Network, to help advertisers get—and measure—the results they’re after. From remarketing to Campaign Insights to video targeting on YouTube, we’re building tools that are helping advertisers get great results and enabling them to run some of the most amazing ad campaigns the world has ever seen.