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Google Lets Advertisers Target By (Anonymized) Customer Data

Posted by timothy on from the you-seem-to-like-sushi-and-the-occult dept.

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.

10 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Ties in with their new motto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Something about evil?

  2. Sanitized data by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've seen some sanitized data that censored the name, but included the gender, age and address.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Sanitized data by dinfinity · · Score: 3, Funny

      - "No, I'm sorry, I really can't tell you who it is."
      = "Aww, at least give me a hint."
      - "Alright. He's 54 and he's President of the United States of America."

  3. Re:Lots of FUD in the headline, no substance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  4. EU Privacy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:EU Privacy by Epsillon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
    2. Re:EU Privacy by Epsillon · · Score: 2

      The issue here is that a third party has access to the unhashed identities and are hashing it with the same hash and seed Google use - they have to be or there would be no point in giving the results to Google. That party may not have the nous to stop Google from reassembling their massive hoard of privately identifying information if they really wanted to. They can also gain insight into which hashes have relationships with their customers (the advertisers, we're product not customer) in order to poke even deeper into people's online activities.

      If you're anonymising, it means just that: The data cannot be traced back to a real identity. If you're data mining on an ongoing basis, don't use the word "anonymised" and say what you really mean, otherwise it's just meaningless, misleading bollocks.

      Also to remember is that your identity isn't just your name. In fact, the name is just a convenient pointer others hang on the person that is you. You are the sum of what you do, how you think and who you associate with. Given that, the name/e-mail address/UID is irrelevant, at which point the hash itself becomes your identity, even more so than your name or SSN.

      --
      Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
  5. Re:Ties in with their new motto by davester666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  6. Alphabet got rid of "Don't Be Evil." by transporter_ii · · Score: 2

    Alphabet got rid of "Don't Be Evil." So now they can carry on with a clear conscience.

    And funny, I have always had a hard time remembering how to spell conscience, so I had to look it up on Google. :)

    --
    Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
  7. Google stories by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google selling targeted Gmail ads that look like emails

    Google violating Russian antitrust regulations by bundling its services with Android

    Many web pages load something from Google, so Google is tracking us wherever we go.

    The Slashdot home page loads these from Google:
    1) google-analytics.com
    2) googleadservices.com
    3) googletagservices.com