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Google Patents Detecting, Tracking, Targeting Kids
theodp writes "A newly-issued Google patent for Rendering Advertisements With Documents Having One or More Topics Using User Topic Interest describes how to detect the presence of children by 'using evidence of sophistication determined using user actions' and tracking their behavior using the Google Toolbar and other methods to deliver targeted ads. Which is interesting, since the Google Terms of Service supposedly prohibit the use of Services by anyone 'not of legal age.' The inventor is Google Principal Scientist Krishna Bharat, who is a co-inventor of another pending Google patent for inferring searchers' ethnicity, reading level, age, sex and income (and storing it all)." Ok I'll be the first to admit that this is greek to me. Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english.
I used to work for Sprint as a crappy CSR (Customer Service Representative) back when they forced you into contracts for making any sort of changes to your account (esp. price plan changes), and I can say that customers were not always (or even commonly) aware as to their entering a binding legal agreement. There were a lot of times when a customer would call up to cancel, and you state that they'll have an ETF (Early Termination Fee) due to a previous price plan change; they were shocked and denied that they were told anything, and usually went on to claim that they are legally entitled to be warned of this.
Even though it was blatantly obvious that our staff, not to mention the under-trained overseas non-English speaking staff, were not informing the customers of this fact, we were informed that we had to tell the customer that their claims were meaningless. We had no records of our staff NOT informing them that a contractual obligation came with the account changes, so we can only assume that they were told. A verbal contract is a binding contract, and the website has the full details of the contract extensions, if they bothered to go search. So basically we were told to tell them, "too fucking bad!"
Nowhere in my CSR training did they state that we had to inform the customer of contract extensions, and the retention rate of employees was terrible... so one can only assume that very few people in the building were doing their jobs even remotely correct. (These are all obvious reasons for the exodus from Sprint by their customers)
How does all this relate to the OP? It highlights the casual disregard by big business of their legal obligations. If there is no record that you were not informed that a contract was required, then the business can only assume that you were under one.
- John
Please don't let my wife know about this.
"do you actually realize you are just part of a modern mega-Advertising Machine?"
So fucking what? Is it better to be a part of a modern mega-Car-making Machine?.. or a modern mega-Paper-pushing Machine?
At its utmost core, advertising is doing a very important job - connecting people who would like to buy something, with the sellers who are offering something for sale. Like it or not, but advertising, in whatever form, is an integral part of a market economy. The fact that advertising is obtrusive and annoying, is not any more an inherent property of advertising, than killing innocent people is an inherent property of a sword (I was going to say "gun", but realized where I was).
If anything, you should be PRAISING Google for furthering the idea that advertising can be profitable WITHOUT being intrusive, and disruptive. As opposed to spamming you with images or sounds hawking products you're not interested in, Google politely shows you products that their software thinks you might be interested in (to the best of their ability to determine this).
Only communist-pipe-dream hippie would think something wrong of such an approach, or would think it shameful to work at such a company. Ultimately, everything is relative, and I'd rather have Google than many of its competitors.
ftfp: "Different sets of one or more ads can be associated with the different levels of user expertise in a give topic. Using evidence of sophistication determined using user actions for example, ads targeted for novices, average sophistication, or experts (e.g., children, tourists, scientists) may be served and rendered."
This is simply an extension of what google already does at the page level. Instead of settling for targeting ads based on the contents of the page, google would like to tailor ads based on what the user is specifically looking at on a page. The above quote denotes the fact that they are likely to find correlations among certain demographic and age groups.
"In this example, one or more ads associated with topic 1 might originally be rendered in association with the document 1410. If a user were to follow the link 1414a, interest scores of one or more ads associated with topic 2 could be increased. In this case, upon returning back to document A 1410 from document B 1420, one or more ads associated with topic 2 might now be rendered in association with the document 1410."
The previous quote from the patent shows how google would use your recent browser history along with whatever tags they associate with a page to serve 'relevant' ads. This is similar to what I expect google to do with the doubleclick data they will be receiving shortly.
On a more ominous note, the following claim is a bit unsettling and reminds me of http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/21/1511240. Who's letting all these guys control cameras in our houses?
"9. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 wherein the actions of the user monitored are selected from a group of user actions consisting of (a) cursor positioning, (b) cursor dwell time, (c) document item selection, (d) user eye direction, (e) user facial expressions, (f) user expressions, and (g) express user topic interest input. "
Ummm, somebody at homeland security just wet their lips....
anyone here no where i can find a good priced lcd? 15-17"
Thanks.
Have you tried Froogle*?
*Hey, it's on topic!