Google Profiling Social Network Users

David Harry writes "Google is looking deeper into behavioral targeting of social network users with three more patents. A while back, one patent came to light in the poorly termed ‘friendrank’; Google could be profiling social network users. These three patents now bring the series to five in total."

Comments

Google needs to revise their motto

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Do no evil? Hardly,... when Google became a publicly traded company their obligation became one thing..

Make money for stockholders

Few companies set out to do bad deeds but most won't rule them out. Google was supposed to be different. Regarding "Don't be evil"(tm), CEO Eric Schmidt recently clarified the policy saying that it was simply meant as a conversation starter.

Here's Google from good to bad...
Plus
Creating a foundation to fight poverty.
Plus
Establishing on-site day care as an employee perk.
Minus
Giving Brazilian police access to private photo albums on Orkut to assist an investigation into child pornography.The lesser of two evils is still pretty lame
Minus
Google's on going smear campaign against Privacy International for giving them a last place rank.
Bigger Minus
Raising cost of on site day care to $57,000 per year.
Real big minus
Instituting keyword filters at the request of the Chinese government. Google's do no evil policy only applies to the U.S.
Source: Wired 16.10

Honestly why should anyone be surprised that Google acts like any other company?

Re:Google needs to revise their motto

[spydabyte]

Congratulations. You just summed up the entire 13 year history of Google in 6 bullet points.

Next time, try and broaden your biased view.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Google has no problem selling jewels from their data mines to marketing clients who want them, mostly in the form of "targeted advertising".

And the only reason people aren't swearing off google.com is that their not really selling the jewels. Google is doing the targeting themselves. They are NOT selling your data to advertisers. They are placing the ads themselves.

Re:Not Alone

[AmberBlackCat]

I think it's also worth mentioning that the social networks themselves are profiling people. There's a reason they want you to enter your occupation, educational background, yearly income, and all other types of information.

What drives me the most crazy is Facebook actually creates search pages for search engines to index. I'm the kind of person who likes my words to be seen by everybody, but my pictures to be under my own control. So I searched for myself on Google and found that not only do they put my name and profile picture out there, but they also include a list of people on my friends list and all of their profile pictures, even though every single one of these is a "private" profile with pictures set to only be viewable by friends and "friends of friends". I realize there's a setting to disable the search page but I never enabled it in the first place, or even realized it existed until i searched for myself. I also get the part that if I want my pictures to be off the internet then I shouldn't put them on Facebook and MySpace. But it seems like they went out of their way to make them publicly available.

Re:Not Alone

[Alpha830RulZ]

It's not as nefarious as you think, but there is considerable value in tracking what you buy as a single consumer, both to you and to the store. The store would rather maximize value per consumer, than necessarily maximize sales. By maximizing sales from a smaller amount of consumers, they can potentially reduce inventory, and reduce labor, thus increasing profit for a given amount of sales. By tracking not just what was sold, but associations between goods sold, you can find out some interesting things about your demographics. That said, I don't know, and cannot tell your penis size from what you buy. Even if you buy the extra large condoms.

There is a value proposition to the customer. What you/we get as a consumer is a more targeted inventory that may contain new goods that we may find interesting. The stores get data about price/purchase behavior, and that encourages them to reduce prices on key items to get you into the store. You actually want them to care about you as a prime customer, because what they do is reduce price on high volume items that you care about, to get you in to entice you to buy other items. You don't have to buy the other items. But you will, because it will be worth it to you to avoid another trip. ;-)

And yes, IAADM (I am a data miner). I just did a project like this for a major consumer goods chain.