Like many grown ups, I take my privacy seriously. However, that doesn't seem to be the sentiment amongst many who are of my age group. The convenience that the social websites and free cloud based services offer over-shadows major underlying issues of personal privacy and ownership. Web based services are offering an array of free utilities, like search engines, email, collaboration tools, social content, etc., in exchange for our permission to expose us with advertisements that generate those service providers revenue. Advertisements are not a bad thing. I am not at all opposed to them. They are what enable the service providers to offer their services for free. Many will argue that it is a fair bargain. However, recently, it has become more and more evident that service provides are beginning to step out of their bounds. Google more so than the others.
Google benefits from the advertisement revenue. The amount of revenue Google can generate from advertisements is directly related to one factor: number of users. Considering that only a certain percentage of the population reacts to advertisements, there are two ways by which Google can make more money: expanding their existing user base which leads to revenue increasing by similar ratio as users; and offering targeted advertisements to its existing users, where each user now becomes more likely to interact with the ad, which means more revenue with the same user base. Google already has the biggest market share with its search engine and advertisement revenue. There is not too much room for expanding user base. Targeted advertising gets to be the winner.
I also have nothing against the concept of targeting advertisements. I'd rather share my content space with advertisements of products and services that I am interested in than those that I am not. It is how Google does it what bothers me. Every time you search using their search engine, every email correspondence you involve in, every direction you look up on Maps, every document you work on on Docs, probably even every private chat conversion you participate in on gTalk, and every phone conversation through Google Voice gets mined for information that is used to decide what advertisements are to be targeted towards you. Add Chrome Browser, and Android phones to the list too.
Its a matter of personal privacy. I do not want anyone to go through my non-public content without my permissions. By non-public content I mean my emails, interpersonal communications in any other forms, search and direction queries, notes, digital media that are not explicitly marked for public viewing, etc. I own the digital content that I generate. I have the freedom to decide how I wish to share it, whether with a selected few (like emails), or with everybody (like this blog), or with nobody (like my backups). It is a shame that there some service providers out there who are not willing to acknowledge that. Who knows who all Google has provided access to that data. It could be marketing agencies, and even government agencies.
I'd be happy to provide one hundred product categories and brands that I'd like to receive advertisements from. Ask me about the information you need from me rather than going through my closet. Its no worse than eves-dropping. That's what it is, digital/electronic eves-dropping. I'll just have to take my business elsewhere.
By the way, Google, you "do" have my permission to use the information from this post to suggest products and services to me.
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