What’s critical is that there are easy ways for those who want to avoid the more robust types of data targeting to be able to take easy steps to do so.” “Some users may appreciate relevant advertising, many others may not. By now, most of the websites you visit are already sharing your activity with a wide network of third parties who share, collaborate, link and de-link personal information in order to target ads,” said Jules Polonetsky from Future of Privacy Forum. “Google is actually quite late to this game. Google says that the change is optional and is aimed at giving people better control over their data. Facebook has been tracking logged-in users ( and even non-users) by name across the internet whenever they visit websites with Facebook “like” or “share” buttons.

Google isn’t the first company to track individuals in this way. It also means that the DoubleClick ads that follow people on the web could be personalized based on the keywords that individuals use in Gmail. In practice, this means that Google can now, if it wanted to, build up even richer profiles of named individuals’ online activity. In 2012, Google made a controversial update to its privacy policy to allow it to share data about users between different Google services, but it kept DoubleClick separate.

Sergey Brin reassured privacy campaigners, saying: “Overall, we care very much about end-user privacy, and that will take a number one priority when we talk about advertising products.” Google, on the other hand, has users’ (mostly) real names, email accounts and search data.Īt the time of the acquisition, a number of consumer groups made a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission arguing that bringing these data sets together would represent a huge invasion of privacy, giving the company access to more information about the internet activities of consumers than any other company in the world.

Link youtube to google ads