Ich heiße Hans

"It Knows" — Daniel Soar reviews ‘The Googlisation of Everything (and Why We Should Worry)’ by Siva Vaidhyanathan, ‘In the Plex’ by Steven Levy and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ by Douglas Edwards · LRB 6 October 2011 (print version)

2105:

Since Google still makes more than 95 per cent of its money through selling advertising – that’s $30 billion a year, or about twice the annual global revenue of the entire recorded music industry – the fear is that all the information about us it has hoovered up is used to create scarily exact user profiles which it then offers to advertisers, as the most complete picture of billions of individuals it’s currently possible to build. The fear seems be based on the assumption that if Google is gathering all this information then it must be doing so in order to sell it: it is a profit-making company, after all. ‘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.

Nothing particularly new to those who follow such topics but it is still interesting to consider the power Google has yet to make available around their advertising. I can only surmise they’re biding their time to release something shockingly comprehensive…and, hopefully, something that doesn’t reek of evil to us, its product.

(Source: journo-geekery)