Comments on: Google Ads: Did You Know You Could Do This?

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:57:17 +0000

1. No.
2. They don’t surprise me, but they aren’t accurate either, thanks to standard + custom adblock filters.
3. Maybe it sounds selfish & naive, but I run ABP so that I can avoid having to interact with them at all. I don’t want them to see me whatsoever.
4. Making a change would be a proactive move that gives more information than I’m comfortable with, so no.

I realize it’s foolish to think I can avoid leaving any sort of mark, but I’d like to leave as small a footprint as possible, and that means not even running show_ads.js.

By: Wladimir Palant

Wladimir Palant — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:52:26 +0000

1. No. Even after you mentioned it, I didn’t realize that there is anything other than the usual sales pitch on that page – only found the link to the ads preferences on third attempt.
2. “No interest categories are associated with your ads preferences so far” – makes sense, I don’t allow persistent cookies to be stored in my browser, with very few exceptions.
3. I guess I am already in control.
4. No, the cookie wouldn’t survive too long anyway.

By: Jesper Kristensen

Jesper Kristensen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:24:44 +0000

I would not have found that page if you did not tell me it was there.

But the only thing the page tells me is that I have to opt in to being tracked by a cookie before I can use the page.

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:36:24 +0000

Interesting. They tell me I have disabled Cookie though I clearly have enabled them both for the site the ad was on and http://www.google.com. Possibly not for their ad servers, though, but that’s not very transparent in our and their UI

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:13:14 +0000

1. No.

2. First, mine:

Arts & Humanities – Humanities – History
Finance & Insurance – Accounting & Tax
Finance & Insurance – Credit & Lending – Credit Cards
Industries – Design
Local – Regional Content – Western Europe – United Kingdom
News & Current Events – News Networks
News & Current Events – Politics – Elections & Campaigns
Photo & Video – Photo & Video Sharing
Society – Government & Regulatory Bodies
Society – Social Science – Economics

Some do, some don’t surprise me, basically inversely proportional to their accuracy. I’m not sure how I got the photo/video sharing one, maybe it’s from all the high culture #foxymonkies directs at me on a daily basis. The UK one I guess is maybe from my still following that Latest Headlines live bookmark that’s in the default bookmarks in Firefox, so it thinks I’m a BBC fan. The finance ones might be through a couple economics sites I visit, although the credit cards one is a bit of a joke as I have more credit cards than I need (and sadly I can’t get rid of the ones I don’t want, because FICO scores reflect the longevity of the oldest card; dumping the one I didn’t get a month ago wouldn’t help that). Design is a stumper: maybe from viewing blog entries of HCI people in the Mozilla and GNOME communities? I can’t explain that one.

3. I can’t say I care one way or the other. My ad-blocking sense is highly tuned so that I barely see ads, and I make so few purchases outside of food (includes restaurants, but those are more a matter of opportunity and geography than of advertising) that advertisers will find it nearly impossible to grab even a sliver of my discretionary spending.

4. Did you make any changes while you were there?

Sure, why not since I know about it and am looking at it — removed photo/video sharing and the credit cards options. I’ll let it keep incrementally discovering new categories and not add new ones; I have better things to do than select categories I won’t actually buy from anyway.

Incidentally, I couldn’t figure out how to follow your suggestions until I realized I’d blocked images from that server ages ago — had to go into Page Info to unblock, then reload the page to view.

By: Michael Lefevre

Michael Lefevre — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:28:52 +0000

1. I’ve clicked through before to find the sales pitch – I didn’t know it had a preferences thing on it now (actually I’m not sure I would have noticed that little link had I not been looking for it now).

2. There are no categories listed (probably because this browser doesn’t keep cookies past the end of a session)

3. I am aware this stuff is happening anyway, and if I’m going to see adverts, I’d rather see relevant ones.

4. No – no point on my computer at work because it won’t store the cookie anyway. I could try at home, but even there my Firefox only stores cookies from whitelisted sites, so it depends if the cookie is from a domain I have whitelisted.

By: Jonas Sicking

Jonas Sicking — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:24:22 +0000

1. No!
2. Yes. It was wildly inaccurate. All they had me for was “Lifestyle”. I guess there aren’t enough google ads on mozilla.org and w3c.org pages
3. Yeah, I like this. I especially like that they are upfront about the data they have on me (well, the aggregate at least. Better than nothing).
4. Yup. Replaced “lifestyle” for “computers”, “science”, and “cars”

By: Alexander Limi

Alexander Limi — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:20:49 +0000

I used to work for Google, and I had no idea that thing was clickable. They are not doing a particularly good job at indicating that it is.

By: Chelsea

Chelsea — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:22:18 +0000

1. I did not know.
2. The contents did not suprise me, but made me feel a little shallow.
3. I like the option to make the ads shown to me more meaningful, thus increasing the chance that one day, they may actually show me something useful (dare to dream!). Seeing the profile laid out may have been the intervention I needed in terms of my gossip consumption.
4. I made no changes.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:42:56 +0000

Didn’t know about this. Seems accurate. I have:

Computers & Electronics
Local – Regional Content – Western Europe – United Kingdom
News & Current Events – Newspapers
Science
Sports

Note that at the bottom of that page there’s a link to: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/sr/nai/optout

Which curiously says for Google: “No cookie”… and a lot of networks I haven’t heard of have “Active Cookie”.