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Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses
- TomAnthony 11y agoIt is unclear if this will be for the 'display network' (i.e. sites hosting adsense) of just for ads on Google properties. If this is across the whole web, then it will be interesting to see the privacy protection they have in place.
- shostack 11y agoI'd be shocked if it wasn't across properties. So GDN, Youtube, Search (via RLSA).
- baconner 11y agoGet ready for ads to start addressing you directly by name and doing other like things to get your attention. Google isn't usually _too_ overt about these sort of things but the less savory ad networks could get really unpleasant. "Hey there George Thompson, click to see one weird trick to hide your arrest records from your wife Mary"
- TomAnthony 11y agoSo some more digging and it seems there will be a minimum of 1000 users per group [1], so we aren't quite yet at the point of targeting individuals. [1] https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125 https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125
- baconner 11y agoYeah that's not too awful. Google's too smart I think to do something as overt as my example.
- tehwebguy 11y agoAnd it says "Active visitors", makes me think it might not work with 1 real address and 999 fake ones
- ceejayoz 11y agoI fully expect the folks who make Facebook like and YouTube video view farms to start farming email addresses you can use for this.
- chipperyman573 11y agoWell, google doesn't know if people are active on non-google sites. And they couldn't tell advertisers or people would be able to upload 999 fake emails and 1 real one and tell if they're an active google user.
- GrinningFool 11y ago- google doesn't know if people are active on non-google sites - I don't have numbers, but I know that the overwhelming majority of sites I see in a given day, week, or month use google analytics. A helpful 'free' tool that gives site owners excellent stats, and gives google insights into almost all of the off-google browsing that happens...
- gk1 11y agoAs another posted commented, there will be a minimum list size to prevent this sort of thing. For example, Twitter already allows targeting to specific individuals, but the list minimum is 500 (if I'm not mistaken).
- jtokoph 11y agoBut couldn't I put: youremail@gmail.com fakeemail-1@gmail.com .... fakeemail-499@gmail.com
- gk1 11y agoI should've been more specific. Twitter requires a list of 500 _recognized_ emails.
- ceejayoz 11y agoWhat's stopping me from setting up 500 recognized emails?
- kristofferR 11y agoFor this Google offering they're likely to use the same tech that powers their new CAPTCHA-less reCaptcha.
- ceejayoz 11y agoWhich is trivially broken by having real people simulate a bunch of real Gmail accounts. Services like this already exist for Facebook likes, YouTube views, etc.
- kuschku 11y agoWhich is (a) cheaply broken by hiring a few hundred bored students, and (b) is also even possible to be broken analytically. It is actually easier to break than the highest level of the previous captcha, as now you just need a Google account with semi-normal activity and a JS runtime that pretends to be a normal browser. The semi-normal activity is simple to be possible by running it as a bot and feeding it with search queries for 8h a day, running a query every few minutes. Which, in turn, gets the account marked as active.
- panarky 11y agoYou are prohibited from creating ad content which implies knowledge of personally identifiable information or sensitive information about your customers ... Sensitive information about your customers can’t be used in Customer Match campaigns or ads. Additionally, you can't use data from your Customer Match campaigns to identify sensitive information about your customers. Sensitive information includes: Interest or participation in adult activities (including alcohol, gambling, adult dating, pornography, etc.) Sexual behavior or orientation, such as sexual orientation inferred from a user's visit to a particular website Racial or ethnic information, such as from sites or apps that collect affirmative racial or ethnic identification from visitors Political affiliation (other than the public registration information of United States voters), such as from sites or apps that solicit or store people's affirmative political stances More here: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6299717 https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6299717
- outside1234 11y ago_you_ are prohibited, but Google is not. I'd suspect they will mix in more and more of this context (from Nest, from emails you provide, from your driving habits on Google Maps) to make ads "more personal" as time goes on.
- tuckerman 11y agoPresumably Google could already be doing this in their own ads before this announcement. I don't know if this announcement implies any nefarious motives in this space (not to say they aren't planning this, but just seems unrelated).
- baconner 11y agoThere is actually a creep-out effect with taking this too far I think that drives people away from ads that are too stalkery. Consider the case of target who toned down the exactness of some of their targeted mailer ads to women likely to be pregnant after accidentilly kicking off the outing of a pregnant teen to her family. Perhaps we should be more creeped out by the more subtle personalized ads than the clumsy attempt I suggested.
- x0x0 11y agoSome ads already have that much info about you if you're being advertised to because of retargeting/remarketing. Eg when you bail from a site with something in your shopping cart and that item follows you around the internet. That said, this is a great reason not to browse the internet with logged in google email. That was always the flaw in the firefox 3rd party cookie blocking debacle: it would have been an enormous gift to fb, google, and twitter.
- swalsh 11y agoWhich is kind of half pointless. I see ad's all day long that are half relevant to me. I rarely click on them. Just because they start screaming my name doesn't make me more likely to click. The most effective advertisements aren't ads. Most of the time I use a product or service it's because I saw someone on here or someone I know talking about it.
- kristofferR 11y ago> Just because they start screaming my name doesn't make me more likely to click. I suspect you are a relatively rare border case, then.
- on_ 11y agoThis came up a few days ago on HN. There is brand awareness as well as direct sales. So if you see a Heroku advert, then see an article on HN a few days later about it, when looking for quick app deployment you may start at heroku instead of engineyard. Also, everyone underestimates how much advertising works. People often downplay advertising and beleive it affects others much more than themselves. While for low hanging fruit like MacKeeper, a shit-tier virus-spam-app that constantly is displayed via popups, targeted ads based on your preferences are subtle and difficult to weigh.
- ergothus 11y agoFar more sinister would be "Your wife Mary has an arrest record, click to see it!" (but of course, she doesn't - they just want the click, and get to imply validity by means of knowing other personal details). As you said, I doubt Google would try/permit this, but this will certainly come through.
- nsgi 11y agoWouldn't that be classed as defamation?
- togedoge 11y ago"Does your wife Mary have an arrest violation? Visit now to find out!" URL: http://www.arrestd.com/mary-smith http://www.arrestd.com/mary-smith H1: Is your wife Mary secretly a criminal? Body: Who knows what secrets are being hidden from you -- right under your nose! Do you know Mary as well as you think you do? For only $2.99/month we will alert you to any criminal actions and public records that we find on your wife. Get started today! Easy payments with Paypal Related Stories: Is your ex-wife Harriet on Ashley Madison? Is your brother Blake in debt? Are your parents Anita and John under foreclosure?
- zkhalique 11y agoI am curious, why do they always say the word "weird" in these ads? It's too tacky for most people to think they are "dispassionately" describing the product. One weird trick. It's almost a shibboleth now of hucksters.
- userbinator 11y agoMost people on HN have probably grown sick of those stock phrases, but if they're still using them in ads, there's probably "plenty of other fish in the sea" willing to take the bait... if you've ever observed "normal" computer users browsing for any length of time, you'll see what I mean.
- Gustomaximus 11y agoI wouldn't hold your breath. Marketers can already do this to an extent on Facebook. FB allow targeting in minimum groups of ten emails at a time. For large companies it's easy enough to batch data groups of 10 for things like happy b'day or 'Hello George' type messages. Or to take it to the 1-1 level there was an amusing case of someone trolling their flatmate by uploading 10 email addresses, nine of which were girls and selecting the sub-targeting option of 'male only'. He then ran super personal ads to freak out his flatmate. FB may have fixed this 1-1 option now given the publicity. Personally I don't do these type of comms in my marketing as people find it creepy. Nor have I seen other utilising this like that. I have used FB for targeting with generic ads so people don't realise they are being targeted at that level. It was quite effective. End of the day professional marketers are trying to get relevant ads in-front of relevant users and not waste budget with unneeded impressions/clicks. All that said, I do see the potential for abuse on this. I kinda feel regulators need to step in and place clear guidelines for people protection, perhaps rules around PII (personally identifiable information) sharing between organisation which is getting very common these days to enrich each others data. Also in the same way many professionals are accredited, I wonder if people working across larger PII data sets should require accreditation. Something that ensures they know the rules, and if they are abused they can be removed from the industry.
- lukebennett 11y agoThis is going to require merchants to update their privacy policies, surely. Sharing personally identifiable information with Google (which could be subsequently joined together with data from other merchants to form an even bigger profile about you outside of your control) is entering a whole new (terrible) world.
- gk1 11y agoFor most major ecommerce sites this won't be too different from what they're already doing.
- lukebennett 11y agoFew third parties have the potential to do with your data what Google can - Facebook perhaps being one exception. I'd say this represents a significant step up in terms of data collection. I've certainly never worked with a supplier that could offer anything like Google could.
- calbear81 11y agoThis is already an option on Facebook called "Custom Audience" so I'm not surprised that Google is releasing this as well. Regarding the privacy implications, almost every major e-commerce site already uses third party marketing systems, oftentimes with e-mail address, so this is pretty much the same. They're not selling the data to a 3rd party since they are a 1st party using a 3rd party tool.
- coldcode 11y agoSomeday every ad will know us better than we know ourselves. Maybe that's already possible.
- frandroid 11y agoTherapy delivery through ad networks. Finally something socially constructive...
- timthelion 11y agoThis is a great reason to use subuser.org . Sign into google using one subuser, and do you web browsing in another.
- mmccaff 11y agoA list of email addresses "which can be matched to signed-in users" - it is not clear if the list will have to be gmail addresses matching the logged in users? I'd assume so, unless Google is maintaining links between people's google email addresses and other addresses they might use (eg. multiple email boxes being used on the same phone)to make a match, which is also plausible.
- Animats 11y agoThe article, quoting Google's PR: "Google is in a unique position to connect consumers with your business in the most relevant ways. Whether they’re searching on Google, checking promotions on Gmail, or watching videos on YouTube, we can deliver the most relevant information based on what they’re doing, wherever they are, when they’re looking, and on any device they’re using. Today, we’re building on these capabilities with new ads innovations to deliver even more relevance." "Checking promotions on Gmail"? Eric Schmidt once wrote: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it… We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” That was in 2010. They're now well over the "creepy line", and probably well past the European Privacy Directive. Log out of Google, now. Delete all their cookies. And get off Gmail. There's a site on how to do this.[1] You don't need Google's "services". [1] http://www.leavegooglebehind.com/ http://www.leavegooglebehind.com/
- tdkl 11y agoCan't use favorites on Youtube without being logged in... Anyone with a sane workaround for that ?
- Animats 11y agoBrowser bookmarks.
- ljk 11y agoAlso don't log in to Chrome
- josteink 11y agoDon't use Chrome.
- on_ 11y agoWhat browser do you use? If there was a sane option, I would use it but Firefox really consumes resources even putting effort in to optimizing my settings. Using the tor browser or something is just not practical for everyday use. You can either give your data to microsoft, apple or google (if you haven't already) or use FF.
- NearAP 11y agoThe article gave gave an example of 'Rewards program' of a company. Using that example, most rewards program give you the option not to receive 'promotional emails' from them. Does this mean such companies will also not upload to Google, the email of someone who has opted not to receive promotional emails? If the companies don't do that, how can a user 'opt out' of not receiving such targeted advertising?
- bamboo_7 11y agoDoesn't mean that at all. Reward program would just be an example of a not-necessarily-web company that has a list of customer emails. Nothing prevents them from adding your email to that list. The scary thing is this means Google is targeting and following us on an account basis, not just an anonymous advertiser id. If only there was some universally accepted 'do not track' feature....
- NearAP 11y agoI'm curious - is there any statistic around the number of people who browse while signed in to their google accounts?Personally, I don't do that. I make a conscious effort to be signed out when browsing but I've always wondered if majority of people are like me
- magicalist 11y ago> The scary thing is this means Google is targeting and following us on an account basis, not just an anonymous advertiser id this is only for "Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail"
- eli 11y agoThis isn't about sending emails. It's about Google AdWords display ads. I think it's technically possible to "hide" individual advertisers, but the short answer is: no, the company is under no obligation to stop showing web ads to people who previously said they don't want emails.
- kuschku 11y ago
- shostack 11y agoThis is nothing new as FB has had Custom Audiences available for a while now, and you could also do this with 3rd party audience lists via cookie onboarding services like LiveRamp, etc. What I'm wondering here is if Google will provide any way to upload this info to them anonymously similar to how Liveramp does it. I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of uploading their customer lists to Google (or FB or anyone else for that matter) in plaintext vs. going through a neutral middle-man that lets you just provide hashed values to get a match. EDIT: Looks like my reading comprehension failed this morning and they do allow you to upload hashed lists per their support doc. Also, to clarify, I have little doubt that Google, FB, etc. can't figure out who the people are. The main concern is with the people managing the AdWords accounts pulling/sending around plaintext email lists of all these customer records. That is often extremely sensitive and valuable company data that should never be sent around like that. From my experience, the people managing these campaigns are often not technical or experienced enough to think of risks like that. So hopefully the only way they can access such info is via someone who does have the knowledge/experience to say "yeah, plaintext lists of our customer emails are NOT something I'm going to be sending you a CSV of."
- the_watcher 11y agoPeople send around plaintext files of email addresses all the time. Every single CRM, marketing automation, and ESP make it very easy to do so, and there are hundreds of reasons why you might.
- magicalist 11y ago> I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of uploading their customer lists to Google (or FB or anyone else for that matter) in plaintext vs. going through a neutral middle-man that lets you just provide hashed values to get a match. according to the linked [1] you only upload hashes of email addresses. [1] https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125 https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6276125
- vomitcuddle 11y ago
- mthoms 11y agoWhat's the implication here for sites wishing to monetize by selling (hashed) email lists of their users? Take Reddit for example, it could make a lot of money by selling the (hashed) list of users subscribed to /r/travel (or almost any other sub). Suddenly all those users with adblock who won't fork out for subscriptions would be generating income. I know most TOS's say they don't share email addresses, but sites could theoretically specify that a hash of an email address be allowed.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rokhayakebe 11y agoWhy do I feel someone is going to use this for dating?
- thephyber 11y agoSpearphishers can use this to "date" you.
- pirsquare 11y agoThe adtech term for this is call "CRM onboarding". This technique was actually around for a while and popularize by 2 independent companies, Datalogix and Liveramp (founded by Auren Hoffman). Both of these companies exited with Datalogix (sold to Oracle) at around $1.2b and Liveramp (sold to Acxiom) at $310m.
- thephyber 11y agoWant to get the US government to push for regulation of marketing? Create ad campaigns targeting legislators. I fail to see how this will not eventually backfire eventually. This feature is ripe for abuse from spearphishers.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Want to get the US government to push for regulation of marketing? Create ad campaigns targeting legislators. That's already been invented. It's been a fairly big business for quite a long time.
- iridium127 11y agospam worded in a better way is still spam?
- grayje 11y agoReading a lot of the comments in this thread, you guys are taking this announcement and running with it in some weird directions. Google's just playing catch-up with ad targeting features that Facebook has had for years. Nobody is targeting individual users. There are HUGE amounts of depersonalization work and legal review that go into making something like this a reality. If you think Google's engineers spent more time developing this than Google's legal team spent approving it, you're probably wrong. Say a company wants to target ads to people that are in their email subscription list. Or a brick-and-mortar retailer wants to marry up their in-store customers with online data to target in-store shoppers with online advertising. These are features that have been supported for a while through Facebook and through third-party services like Liveramp. Google is building the infrastructure to support these natively. It's not a new technology. It's a very old one - what used to be called database marketing back in the days of direct mail and catalogs. Granted, I make my living in marketing, so I may be biased, but I think a lot of folks are looking at this the wrong way. More targeted advertising is less annoying, not more. (A) You aren't getting spammed with things that are irrelevant to you. The ads you are shown are more likely to be related to something you actually care about or could potentially want to buy. (B) Advertisers don't have to spend as much money on targeted ads as they used to have to spend spamming the world with untargeted advertising (see also TV, radio, sponsorship & endorsement deals, etc), so their margins go up and they can afford better product development, lower prices, etc. The risks here are that you will somehow be outed as someone that shops frequently at a particular store, not that you're going to be "spearfished" or that the NSA will send drones to your house to kill you with missiles.
- petra 11y agoYour post assumes that marketing generally helps people do the stuff they want, not manipulate them into doing stuff according to advertiser wishes(to some extent). Many users here don't share that notion.