Google's Don't Do Evil and a slippery slope (Part 1)

I remember my first interaction with Google. At this time it was still at google.stanford.edu. Slashdot was abuzz with praise and I started using it in conjunction with Altavista. 
The market was flooded with search engines: WebCrawler, Altavista, Excite & Yahoo just to name a few but Google had that scrappy feeling that big kids lacked. Clean user interface, no obvious in your face advertising and frankly a better page ranking algorithm even back then. But this post isn't about the free market and the formation of natural monopolies. 


Fast forward 3 years and everyone is using Google, still its clean... no annoying in your face ads etc. Then comes AdWords. It was revolutionary and didn't have flashy banners breaking up the clean lines of the the interface. 
So I didn't mind it, it wasn't intrusive to the experience and frankly they had to figure out a way to create revenue from their popularity. It was targeted on your query back then and maybe even a little helpful. Don't do evil was still the name of the game.


The problem is the vast array of data that Google has aggregated on everyone of its users. Their retention policy right now states: "We believe anonymizing IP addresses after 9 months and cookies in our search engine logs after 18 months strikes the right balance." I would imagine a psychologist given access to Google information could create a frighteningly realistic profile of almost anyone at this point. Also do they really anonymize your personal search results, or just their search logs? Google's Search logs would be a social science statisticians dream.


But hey there is always "Don't be Evil" right? I'm not so confident anymore. 


Google Advertising has now become intrusive with their retargeting abilities via Double Click and their own network. Retargeting is great for advertisers and a number of people I have spoken with swear by it for marketing purposes. The moral here is just because it works doesn't mean it's a good thing.


To me it highlights a very important need for any professional: browser and profile separation. 


I run Google Chrome for my normal day to day business activity, Firefox for my personal browsing logged into a different profile and another instance of Firefox for customer engagements and presentations.


There are several reason to do this:

1. You don't want your professional and personal profile linked on the Internet at all. Engines such as Pipl do a great job at looking up your information based on your email and your client really doesn't need to know that your music tastes include Xzibit, Eminem, Phil Collins and David Hasselhoff does he?
   
2. You want relevant ads to pop up to the mode your brain is it. When you are researching a new software option for a consulting customer you don't want an ad to pop up about this nifty new gadget you've been looking at for your kitchen. Limited time offer? Must click!
   
3. You are doing opposition research and are looking at your competitors website. The retargeting cookie is set in your browser.
   The next day, you are working with a client discussing some of his options with them and want to show of this great new blog post someone wrote about your product/company/work. Nothing builds confidence like an endorsement, right?
   You go to the blog which uses Google AdWords and Double Click to monetize its userbase.  There is a retargeting ad above the post and in conjunction with yesterdays cookie and the blog being on the related subject matter it shows an ad for your competitor. At best I would consider this bad form, at worst it might make my customer aware of an 'limited time offer' I'd probably end up having to match.
   
4. Even worse, imagine if a personal cookie of yours causes an ad to show in the exact same scenario for something personal. It could be a political campaign  or a store for model trains or whatever. None of your customers business right? Could this cost you your customers cost business? You bet!

Is this three browser infrastructure the optimum solution? If you want profile separation, yeah.

If you just want to avoid scenario 4 a quicker way would be enabling an Ad Blocker before you go to your client. I can definitely get behind that idea. I don't support constant use of Ad Blockers. The vast majority of Internet content is financed by advertising. The constant use of an Ad Blocker would be a form of stealing from the creators of the content you enjoy. Tread softly, or we will all be faced with a million pay walls in 3 years.

AdBlock for Chrome

and 

AdBlock Plus for FireFox