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Google To Tailor Ads On Web Visits

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By MIGUEL HELFT

The New York Times

Published: March 12, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Google announced Wednesday it will begin showing ads to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting. Like rivals such as Yahoo, it also will give users the choice to opt out from what it calls "interest-based advertising."

But privacy advocates also said Google needed to do more to notify people that they were being tracked.

"We think more needs to be done on how to educate people and tell them how to opt out," said Ari Schwartz, chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Google's foray into behavioral targeting may represent the most visible result so far of the company's integration of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company that it acquired a year ago.
Google will use a cookie, a small piece of text that resides inside a Web browser, to track users as they visit one of the hundreds of thousands of sites that show ads through its AdSense program.
Google will then use that information to show people ads relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting.

The program will first be tested with a few dozen advertisers but Google plans to expand it.
Google will not notify users that it has begun to show them ads based on their behavior, but users who click on the "Ads By Google" link, which appears on thousands of Web pages, will be taken to a site where the technique is explained. There, they will also be able to tap into what Google calls the Ads Preferences Manager, to see and edit the ad categories that have been associated with their browser.

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