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Google's New 'Remarketing' Advertising Remembers Your Lurid Online Past

by Amar Toor on March 29, 2010 at 09:25 AM

We may like to think of ourselves as complex, unique consumers, but -- as the Internet has proven -- advertisers can actually get a pretty accurate idea of our favored products and services by simply glancing through our online histories. Such history-based "behavioral targeting" techniques are nothing new, but a recently launched ad service from Google now allows individual advertisers the chance to continue marketing to us even after we've left their sites.

While Google's current "Internet based advertising" program feeds users a steady diet of ads based on their general areas of interest, its new "remarketing" service allows ads from specific, previously visited sites to pop up in banners on other sites. This basically means that, from now on, you may be constantly reminded of every single site you've ever visited -- even, perhaps, the ones you'd like to forget.

All potential for embarrassment aside, Google's remarketing techniques may rekindle ongoing concerns over online privacy and the ethical limitations surrounding companies' efforts to profile online consumers. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital goes so far as to speculate that the search engine could soon find itself at the center of a Congressional firestorm if it continues to refine its behavioral targeting acumen. As long as users retain the choice to participate, though, we don't see how it could escalate much further.

Google certainly needs to do a better job of keeping users abreast of its marketing tactics, and could definitely make the well-hidden opt-out page easier to find. But, as is the case with most online forums nowadays, we have the final say on how much or how little we want to share with friends, strangers, or, in this case, faceless corporations. The Internet remains a vast, public sphere, and anything we do online is fair game for profit-seeking enterprises. The key, as always, is to keep yourself well informed, and to stay on top of your digital portfolio. [From: AllThingsDigital, via: Gawker]

Tags: ads, advertising, behavior, google, history, marketing, privacy, targeted advertising, TargetedAdvertising, top

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