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Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#81
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

def scumbag_targeted_campaign_builder(accounts): for name, users in groupby(accounts, key=lambda x: x['first_name']): users = list(users) while len(users) Some variation of this is pretty easy, and likely will become common.

I wonder how easy it is. Google says they require 1000 "Active visitors." So you need to not only create 1000 fake accounts to target a single real individual, but run 1000 undetected clickfraud bots (and then pay out on your own clickfraud). Not sure of the current state of the clickfraud arms race, but maybe there are cheaper and easier ways of snooping?

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#82
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this Google offering they're likely to use the same tech that powers their new CAPTCHA-less reCaptcha.

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 sear…

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#83
post #11
post #3

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"

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 pa…

advertisers will do what they do. pay some money on that to tag users with 3rd party cookies (which was 50% of the reason Google sponsored Mozilla. guess if it's enabled by default on chrome...) and then show that personal information on dynamic display (images, flash) ads. probably even on other networks since Google's suck for display.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#84
post #3

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"

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.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#85
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use Chrome.

What 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.

http://www.opera.com/ might be a good Chromium based option. Not perfect, but a solid browser worth exploring, especially since you can use Chrome/Chromium extensions. I've been using it for several months now (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRB...), and am mostly satisfied.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#86
post #11
post #3

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"

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 pa…

The fact that they can do it and are banned by an EULA is just as creepy (if not more) than them actually doing it.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#87
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use Chrome.

What 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.

> If there was a sane option, I would use it but Firefox

I use it daily on all my units (Windows, Linux, Android) and I have zero issues.

In what ways is it not sane?

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#88

This 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…

> 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

Well, Google still knows your customers, then.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#89
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 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.

> If there was a sane option, I would use it but Firefox I use it daily on all my units (Windows, Linux, Android) and I have zero issues. In what ways is it not sane?

i meant to imply that suggestions about browsers, (following a statement like "delete chrome") often aren't practical for most people, and as a web dev I need a fairly traditional environment. So by "sane", I meant things like using ice weasel with noscript or tor-browser, or a very non-traditional small independent browser. I have reasonable privacy and security settings in place but need to be able to test websites etc.

I was asking the above because I love FF but on my macbook it was spinning the fan up and using a lot of cpu. I will try it again, but it would crash or throw the computer into spinning beachball mode; a lot.

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