Privacy panic

Privacy panic Why is Google interested in my cat food?

Google is planning an online stock market to sell in the ad network and ad space usage profiles can evaluate. Observers fear a privacy debacle. But the reality is more complicated.
Hamburg - When it comes to power, and Google's ad sales, is guaranteed excitement. A message from the U.S. magazine "AdAge," has provoked a storm of excitement in Germany. "AdAge" reports on a project called DDP, where several other companies working with Google. The goal: A display market for online advertising, can book places on the customer display at various ad networks.
The most interesting detail: Google wants to DDP not only the ad space to merge the different advertising sales, but also the systems to cut the advertising to specific user groups. Almost every network has based this placement of ads on demographic and other data its own system - Google is working with DDP according to "AdAge" at a standardization of these procedures. Say: If a cat wants to show his ads visitors only feed producer of cat sites, he could enter the central DDP on this setting for all affiliated advertising networks.
So much for the previously known facts. The excitement in Germany was created after the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", referring to the "AdAge" article reported: "In the future, Google advertisers can buy data from consumers, including name, address and, above all, sorted by interests." Under the headline "Google wants to sell directly to user profiles," reports Time Online.
A Google spokesman denied on aac that the company sell user data or profiles. Meanwhile, "SZ" and their texts online Online defused the charge of the sale of user data is no longer falling. But the interpretation of the story holds itself, though nothing concrete is known to DDP. The service industry, "Kress" reports: "The advertising industry is cheering, will demonstrate data protection."
The vote is expected. For completely independent of how Google's new ad exchange will work in detail, should the idea that someone online advertising can cut just like that cat food to friends, many people are scared. The first thought is: They know that I have cats! In fact, the display marketer probably knows only that were called at just the computer used quite often cats sites. And then one sees on other pages advertisement for cat food.
Targeting, user profiles, behavior-based advertising - AaC about how the online advertising.
What is targeting? Summarized under the slogan targeting advertising network very different technical approaches together with which advertisers can be directed to a specific audience. It's all about minimizing the so-called distribution loss: Online advertising should look for cameras only online users who are interested in photography.
Classic printed ads in magazines have already seen such options for targeting: There are trade journals for photography. In addition, the marketing agency to explain every magazine with a broader range of subjects potential advertisers exactly how many readers have at their age, income and education groups her notebook.
Online networks know all that well, they can only differentiate more precisely, because they usually sell special offers on a wide variety of topics on the Web. Google offers advertisers more than 1000 categories of interests (car enthusiasts, frequent travelers, animal lovers), were classified into certain types of surfers.
There are also specific targeting opportunities in the Web: You can advertising at certain times or when certain weather display. It can narrow the regions in which advertising will be shown, but one can also show ads only to users who have accessed certain websites in recent weeks.
The advertisers can buy from these sellers but only access to target groups, not individual persons in this target group. So you can, for example, his cat food display can show online users in Munich, who have called in recent weeks, cats sites. But the advertiser will not know who these cats are now fans. Online advertising is to achieve precisely defined target groups that do not respond directly to individuals such as the controversial direct marketing.
How do the advertising networks, who calls cats sites? All the major advertising networks use so-called cookies. These are small text files that the browser stores on your hard disk on your PC when you subscribe to a website to look at the ads of each network are. About this cookie, the network will then recognize the computer when the browser is called a different offer.
Google, for example sorted on the basis of this information, the individual computer from which pages are accessed to specific interest categories. In that respect, but again and again by "users" is mentioned, but it is meant "a unique instance of a web browser." Say: If two people share one computer and use the same browser, they are considered a user.
What the networks do else? Some ad networks complement the raw material for so-called behavioral targeting to different additional information. Some examples:

    The Yahoo ad network upgraded for the categorization of target groups and from which search queries to Yahoo users entered and which items they have called on the Yahoo-media offer. If someone logs on to the computer with the Yahoo cookie at a Yahoo service (Mail, Flickr) are assigned to the cookie, the demographic data of the last person who was logged into Yahoo. An example: If you specify in your Yahoo profile to be a man from Munich, takes over the network this information.
    Microsoft describes the data base for the target group categories of its advertising network like this: "Because you are using online services and browsing on websites that are provided by Microsoft and Microsoft partners, we use the collected data (searches, page views, links you click, or similar data) to be able to predict which ads you are most interested. "
    Google also offers advertisers a pre-selection by age and sex - but only in a particular advertising environment. Google explains:.. "Some publishers in the Google display network have specific, individual user data in social networks, for example, often ask users to identify themselves by age and sex, some sites in the Google Display Network are available for bidding according to demographic criteria are available, but not many. " That means: When does a page such as YouTube users logged in, how old they are, according to her profile, can be cut to match ads - but only on YouTube.
    Some providers complement the information on surfing habits to responses from anonymous online surveys: published The targeting provider Nugg.ad for example on the websites of its customer questionnaires, focus is loud Nugg.ad "the issues of product interest and demographics" - in other words: how old is the user who just uses the browser, it would also buy skin cream? Such information can be derived from the surfing habits is difficult.
    When U.S. network Adbrite ads can be cut using third party data such as Rapleaf, Target and Info Exelate also on target groups such as "Twitter-member", "married for six months."
From what is known about Google's project DDP, this platform would make it possible to define target groups for targeting ads to options with different ad networks. A hypothetical example, network X knows that tennis regularly with a browser pages are called. Network X knows that have been retrieved with this browser in the past few weeks many pages from his travel partner network. Now, a provider could theoretically leave a message for a trip to Wimbledon Show these users.
How can we stop the data collection? Users can delete individual cookies, generally not to accept these cookies in your browser or allow only specific cookies and let others save only after confirmation. The online ad networks also offer to install a so-called opt-out cookie. Is stored once, not again the provider attempts to set cookies on this computer.