Google’s war on privacy is going really, really well:
On Tuesday in San Francisco, at Google’s annual Marketing Next conference, where it unleashes its latest tools for ads, analytics and DoubleClick, the company announced that it’s ready to answer the question that’s been bugging marketers for ages: “Is my marketing working?”
To deliver the answer, it will be training a machine learning tool called Google Attribution on our buying activity. It’s now in beta and will roll out to more advertisers over the coming months.
As Google’s schematic shows, the artificial intelligence (AI) marketing analytics tool will be following us across devices and channels – mobile, desktop, and probably while we’re scuba diving or trying to shop while we’re hiding in a cave, once Google figures those ones out – to see what we’re buying and match it up with what ads we’ve seen. It will then automatically tell marketers what we’re up to.
As Naked Security’s writers point out, Google’s hunger for data is being fed by masses of unsuspecting people who continue to voluntarily use its products.
Depending on which of its tools we use, Google knows what we think, what we need, what we desire, our political and spiritual beliefs, our age, our gender, what music we listen to, what we watch, what we read, where we’ve been, where we plan to go, where we work, where we hang out, where we live, who we meet, where we shop, when we shop, what we buy, how much money we’re worth, how much we spend, and how much energy we consume.
How does it amass all that data? Through Google search, the Chrome browser, Gmail, Google News, Google+, Book Search, YouTube, Picasa, Translation, Maps, Street Views, Waze, Nest, and… well, the list keeps going, and growing, as Google acquires more companies and more data-crunching ability.
Google now proudly claims that it has access to 70% of all credit/debit card transactions in the United States. That makes it even more important that people find alternative homes for their data. Trusting everything to the hands of one company is a really, really bad idea.