Every move you make, Google will be watching you

First and foremost, it’s paramount to understand that just like every other business, it is equally critical for Google to make money. Having said that, wouldn’t you get cagey when you realise that the largest search engine is stealthily tracking your movements while you happily browse the Internet?

Shailesh Rao, country head of Google India in an earlier interview had alluded “to a new revenue stream that would be a win-win situation for Google and those who use Google’s services.” Although behavioural targeting wasn’t specifically mentioned, connecting the dots is now simple.

Ads that we see on one Google search are heavily influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for "e-tickets," and then "vacations" is sure to serve you ads for relevant vacation trips, for example.

Google changed its privacy policy a few years ago and warned users that it might capture personal information about them for reasons that include "the display of customised content and advertising." For years, search engine companies have struggled to reassure the public that whatever information they collect is not being abused. This has led to much hand wringing about how long they should retain user data. Yahoo had last year announced that it could cleanse its system of user log data within 90 days. By contrast, Google has publicly stated that its data retention time is 9 months.

Yahoo, AOL, Google and Microsoft, the big four on the worldwide web have already invested in advertising firms because they are convinced there is a lot of money to be made by tracking users' behaviour.

Rao had also referred to how Google scans the text of Gmail messages in order to filter spam and detect viruses. And while Google does this, the filtering system also scans for keywords in users’ emails which are then used to match and serve ads right when you are reading your mail. So, when the user opens an email message, Google servers instantaneously displays germane information that is matched to the text of the message! 

If you fine read Google’s policies, you will realise the nuances we sign readily whenever we  use Google and its sites. Google’s AdSense platform serves ads based on the content of the site we view. For example, if you visit a news site, ads on that site may be related to latest news portals or something akin. Google sites such as YouTube, Gmail, Blogger use the DoubleClick cookie (ad serving mechanism) that places the cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages visited or content that you viewed. A backdoor for Google to hear, in simple words.

Where does this leave the users? It probably depends on how each one of us thinks about companies tracking our internet activities, retaining that information, and using ad-serving technology to make assumptions about us. If that’s not a problem, then interest-based advertisements is a great idea.