10 ms·

Get 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

Get 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 ago
So 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 ago
  Yeah that's not too awful. Google's too smart I think to do something as overt as my example.
- tehwebguy 11y ago
  And it says "Active visitors", makes me think it might not work with 1 real address and 999 fake ones
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    I 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 ago
    Well, 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 ago
As 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 ago
  But couldn't I put: youremail@gmail.com fakeemail-1@gmail.com .... fakeemail-499@gmail.com
  - gk1 11y ago
    I should've been more specific. Twitter requires a list of 500 _recognized_ emails.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      What's stopping me from setting up 500 recognized emails?
      - kristofferR 11y ago
        For this Google offering they're likely to use the same tech that powers their new CAPTCHA-less reCaptcha.
        ceejayoz 11y ago
        Which 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 ago
        Which 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 ago
You 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 ago
    Presumably 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 ago
  There 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 ago
Some 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 ago
Which 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 ago
    This 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 ago
Far 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 ago
  Wouldn'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 ago
I 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 ago
  Most 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 ago
I 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.

TomAnthony 11y ago

So 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 ago
Yeah that's not too awful. Google's too smart I think to do something as overt as my example.
tehwebguy 11y ago
And it says "Active visitors", makes me think it might not work with 1 real address and 999 fake ones
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  I 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago

As 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 ago
But couldn't I put: youremail@gmail.com fakeemail-1@gmail.com .... fakeemail-499@gmail.com
- gk1 11y ago
  I should've been more specific. Twitter requires a list of 500 _recognized_ emails.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    What's stopping me from setting up 500 recognized emails?
    - kristofferR 11y ago
      For this Google offering they're likely to use the same tech that powers their new CAPTCHA-less reCaptcha.
      - ceejayoz 11y ago
        Which 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 ago
        Which 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 ago

You 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 ago
  Presumably 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 ago
There 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 ago

Some 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 ago

Which 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 ago
  This 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 ago

Far 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 ago
Wouldn'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 ago

I 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 ago
Most 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 ago

I 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.