Google Lets Advertisers Target By (Anonymized) Customer Data

An anonymous reader writes: Google's new advertising product, called Customer Match, lets advertisers upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords. The new targeting capability extends beyond search to include both YouTube Trueview ads and the newly launched native ads in Gmail. Customer Match marks the first time Google has allowed advertisers to target ads against customer-owned data in Adwords. Google matches the email addresses against those of signed-in users on Google. Individual addresses are hashed and are supposedly anonymized. Advertisers will be able to set bids and create ads specifically geared to audiences built from their email lists. This new functionality seems to make de-anonymization of google's supposedly proprietary customer data just a hop, skip and jump away. If you can specify the list of addresses that get served an ad, and the criteria like what search terms will trigger that ad, you can detect if and when your target searches for specific terms. For example, create an email list that contains your target and 100 invalid email addresses that no one uses (just in case google gets wise to single-entry email lists). Repeat as necessary for as many keywords and as many email addresses that you wish to monitor.

Comments

Re:Lots of FUD in the headline, no substance

[Anonymous Coward]

The privacy issue is the advertiser tells google that you are their customer.

EU Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

EU needs to get off its ass and tackle Google.

Shops giving a HASH of the email address knowing Google can match it to a hash of the list of email addresses it collected by Android, is linkage. It's no anonymized, its simply passed as a hash.
*Linkage* of data by hashing is data. Unnecessary linkage of data beyond needed for a transaction is even spelled out as a no-no.

At what fucking point, are you EU lot going to protect EU Privacy rights? You handed over our fooking banking data to a foreign power, you did nothing when they tapped out networks, get off your ass and enforce the few rights EU citizens have.

Re:EU Privacy

[Epsillon]

Shops giving a HASH of the email address knowing Google can match it to a hash of the list of email addresses it collected by Android, is linkage. It's no anonymized, its simply passed as a hash.

This. Anonymised would be one-way, non reversible obfuscation of the source's identity. This is just pure sophistry foisted upon us simply because the vast majority of people this affects can't tell the bloody difference.

Re:Ties in with their new motto

[davester666]

Sorry, now it's "Do the right thing."

Of course, this is even more ambiguous than the previous one. I, for one, have no desire for the 'right thing' to be done to me, if an MBA is the one deciding it.