Got this notification when I opened Chrome when coming back to my desk after lunch.
“We changed our privacy settings to allow us to snoop on what you’re looking at and shove you ads accordingly. Feel free to opt out, but we’ll probably opt you back in when you aren’t paying attention.”
Question: if personalized ads are so great, why can’t I just go into my google account’s settings and put there all the info about me? My income, my interests, ages of my children, my favorite food… Since personalized ads are so good every google users will just fill it in to get the best ads possible, right? Why not give people this option instead of implementing all this trackers?
Because everyone in the game is making money off those trackers. Just because you give them your address and general interests doesn’t mean they know you’re shopping for a new fence for your house or different daycares for your kids at a specific given time.
They are also scarily accurate too. To the point where some people were finding out their teenage daughters were secretly pregnant when Target would send them an infant coupon package in the mail that was intercepted by them. That was guessed solely on data Google and other entities sold them, that’s crazy.
They do give you that option for a lot of it: https://myadcenter.google.com/
You can set whether information like income, profession, education, etc is used, + or - different topics/brands, as well as see the ads you’ve been shown in the past.
This feature that the OP posted about however is about doing all this in the browser instead of doing the tracking on their servers and across various websites with embedded analytics/tracking code. The end goal is also to get rid of third-party cookies entirely, hopefully shutting down that method of tracking, while still being able to provide targeted advertising.
I’m joking of course but if people really wanted relevant adds they would just set it up like they create playlists in spotify. Spotify doesn’t have to track your browser history to guess what music will you enjoy because people just tell them that. Obviously no one wants personalized ads. Google knows this but they keep pretending that all this tracking is to improve your experience.
I love how targeting yourself with ads relevant to your interests is presented as something advantageous for us. Sorry, I don’t desire to be constantly prodded to take interest in new gadgets and cat foods.
I would fill it up with false information.
Then you will not get all those super useful, personalized ads! How will you know what do you need?
On my work devices I try to Google and use as many websites in Spanish as possible. So now when I get Ads I at least get the benefit of learning some new Español
You actually can in Google ad settings, not that you should give them more info though.