Google announced support for behavioral targeting of ads where it serves ads based on people’s online activity history or interests.
Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.
This type of behavioral targeting technology is not new. However google owns the most amount of user behavior data comapred to anyone else, so this move will be greatly scruitinized as it should be.
Google’s mission of organizing world’s information and making it accessible and useful means that they also have access to ALL the world’s information. I wrote about this here. They know your search history (via its search site and toolbar), your email and other activity (via gmail, calendar, google apps etc), social activity (via google opensocial), health activity (google health), commerce activity (via google checkout), your power usage (google powermeter) etc. You get the picture.
Why is google entering this fray NOW? Is it because of eroding advertisning revenues? It is probably part of the answer.