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For years, Google’s privacy policy essentially prohibited the company from running ads targeting users based off of activity in its popular Gmail platform – meaning that if you sent someone an email about, say, groceries, you would not then necessarily encounter an advertisement about groceries on another platform or website.
But all of that changed during the summer of 2016, when Google deleted a line in its privacy policy, thus allowing it to target users with ads across its platforms and on websites based on Gmail email activity.
ProPublica reported on the change Oct. 21, noting that Google could now, if it wanted to, “build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.”
“The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry’s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous,” ProPublica reported. “In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people’s real names. But until this summer, Google held the line.”
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New Gmail users automatically agree to the policy when they sign up, while old Gmail users must opt-in.
The controversy surrounds Google’s advertising service, DoubleClick, which allows companies to target customers with ads on websites (through the use of cookies).
The old policy stated that “We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent.” That line is no longer in the privacy policy. A new sentence has been added that reads: “Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads delivered by Google.”
The change means you might see an add on ESPN.com for something you wrote about in Gmail.
The good news: It is easy to opt out. Here is how to do it:
1. Go to Google’s My Account page.
2. Click on Mange Your Google Activity.
3. Click on Go to Activity Controls.
4. Uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services.”
6. At the same link, you also can prevent Google from tracking your Location, your YouTube viewing history and your browsing history.
What is your reaction to Google’s new policy? Share your thoughts in the section below:
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