Commentary
Will Google's Super Bowl Ad Backfire?
- by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 8, 2010
The spot, Parisian Love, vividly demonstrates just how revealing users' search histories can be. The 52-second ad consists of a series of 11 searches that tell the story of a man (presumably fictional) who falls in love while studying in Paris, moves abroad and gets married. It begins with a search for "study abroad paris france" and ends with a search for "how to assemble a crib."
"It's great that Google used this opportunity to illustrate the importance of search privacy to one of the world's largest audiences," writes Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He goes on to call for Google to anonymize the data after no more than six months, as rival Bing just promised to do.
The fact is, people's search activity reveals a tremendous amount about them -- probably more than they realize. And Google saves every last query and the IP address it originated from for at least nine months.
Consumer advocates -- and regulators in Europe -- have repeatedly pressed Google to shed data within six months at the latest. Of course, even six months is plenty of time to compromise people's privacy. Consider, when AOL released search data about users, the company only made available around three months' worth of query logs -- yet those logs provided more than enough information time to identify specific users like Thelma Arnold.
Google says it will protect users' privacy, but advocates warn that the company might have no choice but to reveal information it has compiled. Courts can issue subpoenas; saboteurs potentially can break into servers. Either way, once the raw data about users becomes known, it can be used to create detailed portraits of individual users, as illustrated by Google itself during the Super Bowl.
Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at wdavis@mediapost.com
There are about to be a slew of parodies and spoofs. I know of a handful being produced tonight.
Still, without downplaying the importance of privacy of search data, don't most ISPs use dynamic IP addresses?
How much data (read: how many searches) can Google link together before the ISP automatically resets your IP address? Hard to get to a real person (searching for your name and address excluded) when the ID is constantly changing, isn't it? In the case of the commercial, there would be months passing between that flight to Paris and the building of the crib. Wouldn't it look like completely different people under a dynamic IP environment?
You must still be on dial-up service. :-) I have cable and I have had the same IP address for months now, despite not having a static IP. Even without an IP address, it is possible to track users with a computer "fingerprint". It is not as easy, but it can be done.
And you forget about cookies. They are the web marketer's key to tracking the untrackable, and knowing who you are, even if you change your name and put on nose glasses.
But while we are talking about the ability to track users, why does no one squawk about the data stored at the ISP's themselves? They record EVERYTHING I do as far as traffic usage. I don't know how long they store the data, but I have a feeling backups may go back for years and years. And which would you rather hack into, Google or Comcast? :-)
Don't even get me started on browser add-ins. I talked to a technical rep at Alexa a few years ago about their toolbar data who informed me that they not only have data about what sites people visit, but also all of their activity on those sites...!
Because of the lawless nature of the Internet, I think it is the one place we should not have ANY privacy.
I dont believe cookies are as useful as people think. their lifespan is surprisingly short. And I believe that they are considerably shorter than people report.
Anyone who has anti-spyware or anti-virus or any sort of computer "clean up" software has their cookies automatically deleted, even if they don't manually do it on their own.I know my
but I agree that there are plenty of ways "The Man" can watch what we do, and anyone who believes they have any significant level of privacy is sorely mistaken.
The ISPs are another potential landmine in the privacy debate as well. ISP-based behavioral targeting would be infinitely more powerful than cookie based. I'm pretty sure thats why people are against it. That, and the sneaky way they try to force it on you.
But I'm a huge nerd and release and renew my IP connection fairly regularly, mostly to troubleshoot network issues.