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Two-Thirds of Consumers Don't Expect Google To Track Them the Way It Does (niemanlab.org)
A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms. Jason Kint, writing for Nieman Lab: Our findings show that many of Google's data practices deviate from consumer expectations. The results of the study are consistent with our Facebook study: People don't want surveillance advertising. A majority of consumers indicated they don't expect to be tracked across Google's services, let alone be tracked across the web in order to make ads more targeted. Nearly two out of three consumers don't expect Google to track them across non-Google apps, offline activities from data brokers, or via their location history.
There was only one question where a small majority of respondents felt that Google was acting according to their expectations. That was about Google merging data from search queries with other data it collects on its own services. They also don't expect Google to connect the data back to the user's personal account, but only by a small majority. Google began doing both of these in 2016 after previously promising it wouldn't.
There was only one question where a small majority of respondents felt that Google was acting according to their expectations. That was about Google merging data from search queries with other data it collects on its own services. They also don't expect Google to connect the data back to the user's personal account, but only by a small majority. Google began doing both of these in 2016 after previously promising it wouldn't.
Yeah, I get it. Googlers got to eat too. And I use enough of their services that having them keep track of every time I use their service to tailor ads to me is a fair enough tradeoff. I'm not buying poodle-porn and doggie sex toys anyway. I don't even know if that exists (though maybe I'm about to find out.)
But Jesus Christ (no, google, I'm not interested in finding a church), they really need to adjust their machine learning algorithms (please, no keyword matches for that either). I go buy a vacuum cleaner from Amazon, and for months afterwards I'm getting ads for the same model that I already bought!
I mean seriously. If you go google for wedding cake (no, please no marriage ads - that will look pretty strange next to the doggie sex toy ads), what happens? You get tons of ads, as if you have to get a bulk discount of wedding cake.