• by Mark Naples , April 9, 2004

No.

Google does not - in the humble opinion of this onetime privacy officer and industry gadfly.

Surprised? Those of you who have heard me rant about online privacy invasions probably are surprised. But, there are two key elements to this and any privacy debate, and Google has clearly addressed both of them way, way up front - like six months before their hard launch.

One - Is the exchange of personally identifiable information (PII) explicit and clear?

Two - Is the quid pro quo in return of this exchange, what the consumer gets explicit and clear?

The answer to both of these is, of course, yes. Gmail has been clearly positioned even in the first days of its Early Adopter/Beta period as a no-fee email service that will spider emails and target ads contextually against certain keywords within those emails. In exchange for access to your messages - maybe more of your PII than any of you has shared before, users get two MB of email storage (which is a LOAD), and no-fee email that maybe won't be as clunky as other no-fee email services.

What's the quid pro quo? If you're writing emails about surfing in Hawaii to your buddy, you'll get ads for travel deals sent to you. If you write an email with some salacious content in it, you'll probably get a correspondingly prurient ad served to you. If you and your spouse share an email address, you might get some at-home aggravation along the way. (No casino ads, thanks to recent decisions - just online dating services out the wazoo, I guess...)

Sounds like a not-so-bad deal. If Google is serious about limiting its usage of this PII to just building a taxonomy against which to serve contextual ads, then who cares? It's not as though they're scheming about merging this PII against offline data or online non-PII, or anything. That would be so 2001.

If it is truly the case that Google is planning on keeping this PII to themselves, then maybe what we'll see if the advent of contextual advertising in email AND in Search. Think about it - is any keyword buy or so-called Search advertising really advertising when its effectiveness is measured against Direct Response metrics? Of course not, it's still DM. If a marketer buys against performance, it's not advertising, sorry.

With Gmail, Google not only can target "push" style advertising in email, they can cookie users and allow them to build Google home pages that are far better than what they enable today. The key difference between what they'll provide users and marketers that will be better than what Yahoo! does today will reside in Google's algorithms, which they'll be able to refresh regularly, in order to build better targeting taxonomies for marketers to reach their users.

To those of you who have Yahoo! home pages: Have you ever noticed how un-targeted the ads are on your home page? What if the same taxonomy that was behind your home page matched that of your email content? How valuable would the media asset represented by that be for Google? How much more resonance would those ads have for you?

Let's face it kids, Google is just smarter than the rest of us. You've been giving up far more data than what they're going to request to your cable company for years, and if that cable company is Comcast, you might begin wondering why that cable company hasn't figured out how to cross-pollinate that media asset against the broadband service you've been paying $39.99/month for. But, I digress.

If you carry a no-fee credit card, its database on you features not only your Social Security number, home address, and phone number, it also features your average credit card balance, spending patterns, and that on usual evenings you're home at 7 PM. They sell that information to database marketers, of course. The card doesn't cost you anything, but it's not exactly free.

Supermarkets have been doing this for years with those savings cards we all keep in our wallets. These are not really media assets. They're just examples of consumers blithely sharing all manner of PII with marketers for some quid pro quo, be it explicit or implicit. I don't mind it until the phone rings while I'm eating or writing this column. Do you?

With no wide pipe into American households, and no discernable media asset, and with just a FANTASTIC online brand and some serious technology, Google announced on April 1 that it intends to take over the desktop with a really simple and clear quid pro quo that will add value for consumers and marketers alike.

Are you betting against them? I'm not.

One last item that proves how smart they are - they announced it on April Fool's Day, assuredly knowing that people would debate whether or not it was an April Fool's joke. The New York Times piece on it Thursday even led with that. These guys are good.