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

Tired of amateur fliling?

[InspectorxGadget]

Profliling - coming soon to a fliling center near you!

So they _COULD_?

[Theanswriz42]

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

It never ceases to amaze me...

[yttrstein]

How many people are genuinely surprised every time Google does anything to arouse suspicion (at least six times per day) or downright confirm (at least twice per week) that one of the major points to their monolithic presence in world--and not just the tech world--is data mining?

I honestly don't understand. It's been quite clear for a number of years that Google has no problem selling jewels from their data mines to marketing clients who want them, mostly in the form of "targeted advertising".

Of course Google is profiling social network users. Someone has to figure out what they want to buy.

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...

[D Ninja]

Someone has to tell them what they want to buy.

Sort of a funny story I have pertaining to this.

After my girlfriend broke up with me, we changed our Facebook status to "Single." The next day, I was on Facebook and I noticed an eHarmony advertisement that said the following:

"27 and single? PATHETIC. Visit eHarmony.com to find singles in your area."

It's funny now, but I sort of wonder what kind of world we live in where you're "pathetic" for not being in a relationship. That part is sort of sad, really.

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.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[commodoresloat]

not at the same time; note he said "had"

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

[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

[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.

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.

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".

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

[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: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:Google needs to revise their motto

[D Ninja]

Google bashing, huh? Ooo, fun!

Seriously, though. Your "evil" points are somewhat weak.

Creating a foundation to fight poverty.

I'll agree. That's a good thing. Although, some people will argue that they're just using it to get the tax breaks.

Establishing on-site day care as an employee perk.

You have that down as a plus. But, if I don't have kids, that means my benefits are going towards something I don't use. Sounds kind of evil to me.

Giving Brazilian police access to private photo albums...

Private? How so? Private as in Picasa's "private" where it just means you don't come up in searches (but if you know the address, you can still find the album)? Or private as in password protected, etc. Also, the albums that they were given access to - were these people already under investigation. Was Google forced to give that information?

Google's on going smear campaign against Privacy International [google.com] for giving them a last place rank.

I don't know this one, so I can't speak to it.

Raising cost of on site day care to $57,000 per year.

From what? $56,000? $0? Either way - how does this make them evil? Daycare is freaken expensive. I can't believe people use it to be honest. The fact that Google is charging someone for this is not a big deal. I don't know of any place that offers this sort of service at all.

Instituting keyword filters at the request of the Chinese government. Google's do no evil policy only applies to the U.S.

Oh, now, you had to go there. See, at the surface level, Google did evil. They filtered words. BAD GOOGLE! The problem is, if they didn't do that, they would have NO influence in China. What's worse? For them to get their foot in the door and follow protocol now and try to influence change later, or never be there in the first place? It's easier to influence from the inside than it is from the outside. Once Google becomes ubiquitous in China, they will carry a lot more sway. Hopefully that use that to help the people there.

Anyway, your cynicism is definitely well-deserved - lots of companies screw up (because they are run by people and people screw up). But, I just can't say I agree with the issues that you chose (either way).

Re:Profliling??

[goombah99]

Profiling? Sounds painful.

Not if you use a profilactic, and remember boys, if she says "opt out" she means "opt out".

More seriously, anyone who joins a social network wants to be profiled. Isn't that the whole point?

Re:Social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

The kind of relations where in the real world you greet people friendly and discredit them behind their backs?

You obviously do not have high school age daughters.

Profiling for Ads

[paniq]

I hope that all this uncomfortable profiling is really going to improve the ads I'm going to see.

But how will I know when it works? Maybe when they start selling penis shrinking pills.

Re:And what's up with /. and google analytics????

[Spatial]

DNS resolved google-analytics.com to 127.0.0.1

Oh darn. Now how did that happen?

Re:Offtopic tag rant

[halcyon1234]

Well then the system is a douchbag.