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

So they _COULD_?

[Theanswriz42]

I'm reasonably confident Google _COULD_ do lots of things...

Not Alone

[whisper_jeff]

If people think that Google is the only advertiser who's profiling people, they're daft. Any and every advertiser with a hint of intelligence studies their target audience and does everything within their power to know them better than they know themselves. Google just has more tools at their disposal than most advertising firms but they all do it.

Re:Not Alone

[DrEldarion]

Of course it's useful to track that information down to a specific person. One example: Say you put milk on sale for $2/gallon. Are the people who are buying milk this week new customers, or are they the same old people who have been visiting your store? Tracking information like that is insanely useful.

Put it in technical terms - in website logs, would you rather just have an overview of traffic data (you received 10,000 visits today), or do you actually want to see each request, where it came from, what pages that person accessed in which order, and the stats of that user's browser? The high-level data is useful, but the specific data is even more so.

Data mining social networks

[MosesJones]

Seriously, this is a surprise?

The world's biggest commercial data search and profiling company is going to profile yet more online, public information.

I just wonder if the folks at Langley will sit up and say "prior art".

Re:Google needs to revise their motto

[rtb61]

To be fair, by far the majority of companies do not act in this fashion. They respect the privacy of their staff, they respect the privacy of their customers and of course they respect the privacy of total strangers. Only one very narrow segment of the industry continuously and very perversely invades the privacy of every one they can upon a massively and previously unheralded basis and think it is appropriate to attempt to psychologically manipulate people based upon their personal information in order to generate a profit at all costs.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[veganboyjosh]

Someone has to tell them what they want to buy.

Fixed that for you.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[yttrstein]

It also never ceases to amaze me why slashdot comment scores go up in the presence of this sort of comment. I can tell by your nickname "veganboyjosh" that you're probably pretty angry about your perception of giant, "evil" entities pushing around the "little guy", telling him or her what he or she wants, thinks, believes, et cetera.

In no case is it that clear cut. You and your lot who appear to enjoy thinking in terms of "perpetrator" and "victim" fail to take into account the fact that these giant and wild entities like Google are made up of individual people who, at every level, are more or less just like everybody else.

They too buy things and are susceptible to marketing, and they too are largely driven by their desire to spread their seed (literal and figurative) as far and wide as possible, and convert as many people around them to their way of thinking.

It of course has stood to the reason of much greater men than me that the state of an adult's perception and desire is ultimately the responsibility of the adult in question. If someone rolls over when told what to buy, even in the most subtle marketing terms, it's entirely their own fault.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[Anonymous Coward]

And thus it is that these ordinary guys just like you and me can go to work every day, honing new and improved methods to take advantage of the cognitive blind spots we all have, in order to make advertising even more effective. One day we'll look back and wonder at what point we went wrong.