Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who’s viewing it. Now there’s less motivation to read all your personal information.
You ever tried to enforce the changes needed to stop all of that tracking on a small group of friends/family? The number of people that actually like it as long as the down sides are not put in there face is wild.
I don’t mean this as disagreement, just an interesting observation about people.
Agreed, targeted advertising and collecting private information about a person and storing it should be illegal. Decentralized systems, cryptocurrency or tokenized payments, and ephemeral order data that is wiped immediately after fulfillment should be standard. The Internet should be privacy focused.
Yes! Or even just any limits on targeting granularity. Like “show ads for my nail salon to all the women in a 3 mile radius” seems fine. But “show this ad to women aged 33 who have 3 cats and who have been to Kohl’s twice in the last month and have watched at least 30 seconds of videos about Charlie Kirk” is just fucking insane, and they go even farther than that.
I mean yeah it’s the old way to serve ads but it’s incredibly inefficient. Even an example as broad as sports.com, ESPN+ might want to advertise but they only offer their service in the US. They don’t want to pay for impressions from users in France, so a minimum would be geo targeting based on IP.
When you get down to medium and small business, I could have some watches to sell to sports dudes, but my campaign budget is $10,000 so I would only target men 40+ because 20 year old college football fans can’t afford the product.
I don’t like the ad ecosystem but people generally don’t want to pay subscriptions for websites but like the publisher’s content. Publishers gotta get paid somehow.
Why do we have to make advertising efficient?
Personally I think advertising needs a LOT more regulation.
The entities paying for the advertising demand it. It could be untargeted but the conversion rate falls so the ROI of paying ads is less, leading to less to spend per campaign.
Publishers can show the untargeted ads but they get paid less per impression.
That’s kinda the point. If we can’t have economic growth without considering the humanistic aspect of it, then maybe we don’t deserve said economic growth.
And that’s why it should be regulated heavily. Advertising uses scientifically backed methods to short circuit people’s judgement and drive consumerism.
I’ve already agreed the ads ecosystem sucks.
If you had it your way, small businesses could probably not afford to advertise online. It would only be businesses who could blanket the internet with their banners at mass scale without targeting.
We already have GDPR, TCF 2 and various other privacy frameworks and laws localized. What do you want to change?
I personally like publishers staying in businesses who produce valuable content.
If a website can tell what zip code you’re in based on IP, that’s good enough. If someone is using a VPN and their approximate location is obfuscated, the USER can choose to volunteer their location if they want localized ads.
Targeted advertising of any kind should be voluntary.
I also believe billboards should be taken down. Advertisers have been given carte blanche to hijack our eyes, ears, and attention without permission for far too long.
TV and radio managed just fine for years without targeted ads. They targeted the ads based on the content. Saturday morning cartoons advertised toys and ceral. Daytime TV advertises medicare advantage plans for retirees. Country radio advertises white hoods or whatever.
Meanwhile, subscription services without ads also made money.
Targeted ads were never necessary. Outlaw them and the internet and media companies won’t disappear.
TV and Radio ads are somewhat targeted because at a minimum your location is known, either within the radio tower reach or the channels you have access to and/or geolocation your TV provider has access to.
Monday Night Football does not show the same ads in every region. Some are national and others are local, there is still some programattic at play. If you watch through a smart TV you’ll get CTV ads for sure.
A mix of both would be great. Something where your target your ads based on the content only, like the old days, and you don’t need to know your customers at all. Only what you guess they’re most likely to be interested in.
Put gaming ads on twitch streams, or pay a youtuber to be a sponsor. They’re plenty of ways to “target your ads” while not needing to gather all the information you can possibly gather on every single individual in the world
Yeah there’s a been a few attempts at “privacy preserving” user id hashing like Google Topics, ID5, and many more.
Publishers love private deals for ad spend, it’s just more work and can be inconsistent vs programmatic that is less revenue but always flowing.
You can still target ads based on location, but you do it through targeted content like they used to, which also g9ves us more diverse content.
When a local business wanted to put an ad out and didn’t want to go nationwide, they’d advertise in the local paper. Now they just pay Google to target people, which is why 90% of local news has died.