Google Ad Preferences

This was an interesting piece of information that I got from one my RSS feeds from Digg.

Google logs an astonishing amount of data, including the search logs from its flagship product. Europe's data protection supervisors have called for IP anonymization after six months and competing search engines like Bing do just that. Yahoo scrubs its data after 90 days. But Google does the "anonymization" only after 9 months. This has raised a lot of questions in the industry against Google and Google as always wants to defend their methods especially since they have the now famous motto of "don't be evil". The explanation provided by Google for keeping this sort of information for this long is that it gives better results(read as context and people sensitive ads). So basically they track the users browsing habits and creates profiles around people based on their browsing history in Google related products and applications. So it will not be advisable to do a search in Google (especially if you are logged into Google) that says "How to kill my Boss" .Next time you login you might be prompted with ads about rat poisons and hired guns :-)

Now to prove themselves as the "good guys" and to mark themselves as the most transparent, they have build a service called as Google Ad Preferences. If you open this service, Google will show you the profile that they have created about you based on your browsing history. You can go in and either opt out of Google Profiling or Remove a particular profile that you think you don't want to be in.

How to use Ad preferences? As always with Google it's very simple. Log into Google. Go to Google search and type "Google Ad preferences" (or you can try this link www.google.com/ads/preferences/). The page that results will show the profile that Google has created about you , with options to either opt out or removing a particular interest from the list or even add any interests. Have a look at this service and see what sort of profiling Google has done about you!!!