Interesting Snippets

We don’t think of ads as punishments the users must endure, we think of ads done well as something that users would cry over if we took them away,” Horowitz said…. For example, say you review a restaurant. Google will tuck that information away and deliver it when it is relevant, perhaps six months later when one of your friends looks for a restaurant recommendation in the same area. “That’s a gift from me to that person facilitated by Google.

Google, on Tuesday, was awarded a patent for “advertising based on environmental conditions.”… So Google can now deliver targeted ads to users based on their surrounding environment. For example, the patent notes, temperature information gathered by a phone’s sensors can be used to flash ads for air conditioners (if temperatures exceed a certain thresholds), or winter coats (if the temperatures fall below a certain benchmark).

Sensor info isn’t the only environmental information Google wants to analyze with the patent. Google also wants to analyze background information:

“An audio signal that includes a voice instruction from a user of the remote device can be received, and the environmental condition can be determined based on background sounds in the audio signal,” the patent reads.

our Facebook “likes” equaled our actual “selves”—creating a phenomenon that is, for governments as well as corporations, the most tempting target imaginable. This trove of information is to an ordinary census database what a super-collider is to a slingshot.

In the digital age we filter forward instead of filtering out. As a result, all that material is still available to us and to others to filter in their own ways, and to bring forward in other contexts. That is a very significant difference. You may filter those 10 articles, but all the other ones will still show up in a search, or tomorrow you may get them in an email from a friend or Google+ recommending that particular link. Nothing is removed.

‘We are not Google’s customers,’ Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in The Googlisation of Everything. ‘We are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Vaidhyanathan, who likes alliteration but isn’t so big on facts, doesn’t explain what he means by ‘sells’ (or whether ‘to sell a fancy’ could mean anything at all), but if he’s implying that Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers then he’s wrong. It isn’t possible, using Google’s tools, to target an ad to 32-year-old single heterosexual men living in London who work at Goldman Sachs and like skiing, especially at Courchevel. You can do exactly that using Facebook, but the options Google gives advertisers are, by comparison, limited: the closest it gets is to allow them to target display ads to people who may be interested in the category of ‘skiing and snowboarding’ – and advertisers were always able to do that anyway by buying space in Ski & Snowboard magazine. The rest of the time, Google decides the placement of ads itself, using its proprietary algorithms to display them wherever it knows they will get the most clicks. The advertisers are left out of the loop.
So why doesn’t Google market its personal information, when it has so much of it? One answer might be that to do so would be ‘evil’.

Online ad campaigns being tracked by OCR will have a Nielsen tag attached to them. If a user encounters an ad while logged into Facebook, either on the Facebook website or while surfing the web within the same browser, Facebook recognizes the encoded tag. Facebook anonymizes the ad viewership data it collects — e.g., it won’t tell Nielsen that I specifically viewed the ad, but it will add me to the group of females in my age bracket and location who viewed the ad — and send that grouped data to Nielsen.

“The results are astonishingly accurate,” Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of media product leadership, said in a recent interview. “This product will be directly comparable to TV ratings

This month — and for the first time — Facebook started to mine real-time conversations to target ads. The delivery model is being tested by only 1% of Facebook users worldwide. … for the 6 million users involved in this test, any utterance will become fodder for real-time targeted ads.

For example: Users who update their status with “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut.

Hunch spent the first year or so after launching in learning mode, building out the data and finding connections. Now they have enough data, and 20 billion “connections” to be confident in making recommendations to people on just about anything at all.