Customer Match is a new product designed to help you reach your highest-value customers on Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail – when it matters most. Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience.
So I have this crazy, revolutionary idea that could change everything. You ready? You sitting tight?
I’d pay for Google services to not have ads and tracking.
Here’s some water for the shock.
Facebook has been doing this for years… https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Custom-Audiences-Is-Now-Avail…
Oh great then. Nothing to see here, move on, Facebook does it too.
Is Facebook, of all entities, the new baseline for user privacy?
Things just keep getting creepier.
Getting lists of customers from companies gives google even more information about us. We won’t be able to opt out even if we use adblock & ghostery.
Assuming people would be willing to pay google for this, how would it actually work? Pay per ad blocked or monthly fees? Wouldn’t you have to give google even more reliable identity/tracking information just so that they could identify you to not show ads on your device?
One of the many reasons I’m glad I give a different e-mail alias to every site I register with.
It may not be perfect, but it definitely keeps me from being low-hanging fruit.
Shock horror, hardly see enough ads to care other than when I’ve used others computers and wonder what sort of numbnut puts up with so much crap.
I rarely see any ads. I use Adblock Plus, Self-Destructing Cookies and Ghostery.
You should just setup a simple hosts file and change rarely to never.
“So I have this crazy, revolutionary idea that could change everything. You ready? You sitting tight?
I’d pay for Google services to not have ads and tracking.”
Mr. Holwerda, Google has already started going there:
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor/
A Google subscription service to let “you see fewer ads on the web, and you support the sites that you visit with your money.” It doesn’t reduce the tracking.
It’s not far away when we have everyday-life-intrusive advertising as portrayed by the Black Mirror episode “15 Million Merits”.
Edited 2015-09-29 03:40 UTC
This Google Contributor sounds totally wrong to me. So I am paying the biggest fish in the pond money to NOT show me any advertising. Basically I am paying the middleman to not be the middleman. That’s a rack!
Also it is very unclear (unless I missed something) if they still track you and how much money is going to the actual website owner. Could be 80 percent, could be 1 percent?
Google earns about $60 per person. And I believe there are higher value people out there.
You might have to fork over $100 to $300 per year for the privilege.
Yeah, I’d prefer it to be free and add supported. As much as Thom likes to think that paying to be advertisement free is the way of the future, I don’t think there are many that share his view once actual dollar signs get attached. Advertising is mostly harmless, except for the occasional rouge malware laced ad, of course. But I’d consider it a bargin.
Legalized spam.
A more true comparison than you know.
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
“I’d pay for Google services to not have ads and tracking.”
Something like Google Contributor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
I use google’s services (search, gmail, youtube, chrome, etc) but I don’t sign in to google to use them, and to be honest I’m not really sure why people feel the need to.
In fact, unless you always comment on youtube (kinda weird), or use the webmail there’s no reason to ever sign in, which means they can’t really track or target you.
Easy to do on the desktop, I do the same. Don’t login, use incognito mode, close the browser often.
On the phone front that’s a whole different story, try using one without being logged in.
Now here’s another socking idea:
– no tracking and no targeted ads = google gets to keep all the profits from advertising.
– tracking or targeted ads = google is compelled to share the profits from advertising with its tracked users.
Of course this should also apply to others like M$, it’s not like google is the only company doing it.
This is why I don’t own an Android-, Apple- or Windows Phone and I don’t have a Windows 10 desktop or Chromebook (with the default software, I do have a Chromebook I installed a Linux desktop on).
The domainnames I use for email are domains I own.
I prefer to control my own data, thank you very much.
Edited 2015-09-29 12:02 UTC
How can you use Gmail without being signed into a Google account?
You need to be signed on only if you want to use the webmail interface.
If you use IMAP instead, you do not need to be signed in with your browser.
But this then allows them to tie your IP address to your account, surely?
That’s what I was about to comment on, too: if he’s using GMail then Google has his IP-address. Doesn’t matter if he’s using the web-interface or a dedicated client with IMAPS.
Most home users ( and many business users ) would be behind an ISP NAT that would make the IP address meaningless for ad tracking purposes – that’s why everyone tries to drop cookies on your machine because it’s way more reliable.
It being less reliable than cookies doesn’t mean you can’t still be recognized. There are plenty of resources around the web showing plenty of examples of how one could be recognized even when coming from behind a NAT. And, well, Google is very well specialized in finding the needle from the haystack.
Can you point to actual research that can correlate an IMAP mail client with a web browser running on the same computer with at least some accuracy?
I know only of an older approach[1] exploiting insufficiently random “id” headers of IP packets. But with modern operating systems and/or currently in-use NAT techniques that approach is no longer feasible.
Recognizing individual IPv4 users behind CGNAT is even harder, due to not only a single household but now hundreds of users behind one address.
[1] S.M. Bellovin, A Technique for Counting NATted Hosts, AT&T 2002
You make a good point about correlating NAT-ed addresses. Just thinking on the hoof, I’m sure there are ways though.
Many email clients will send the local IP address as the SMTP HELO/EHLO string (e.g. see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2209084 ). Combine this with your external IP address to get an identifier.
You can also get a local IP with Javascript (using WebRTC, see http://net.ipcalf.com/ ). Combine with the external IP to create the same identifier.
This may not always work (depends on your email client), and comes with the caveat that I’ve not tried it. And to be honest, I’d be surprised if Google are doing it (someone would have noticed them misusing WebRTC like this).
flypig,
If the mail client displays images, that opens up tracking imap sessions using cookies. I don’t know if google still does this, but apparently did at one point. Notably absent was an email specific unique id.
http://superuser.com/questions/658098/how-does-googles-cleardot-gif…
Still, since thunderbird does not share cookies with firefox, it would be difficult to correlate those beyond a shared IP address. However assuming the user clicks on a link to open up the browser, and assuming the link contains a traceable ID that google can read, then that would provide the correlation. Once this correlation is recorded by google, a robust mapping between Thunderbird and Firefox cookies would exist.
There are a couple assumptions in there, and like you I’m not claiming that google is actually doing this, but at least in theory it would be possible to correlate the two. Also even without an absolute correlation, I think a statistical correlation could nevertheless reveal many hidden associations – just like how the NSA infers relationships using cell phone proximity data.
I looked at a few emails from gmail users, and I didn’t find any google tracking images/cookies. Is anyone using gmail via IMAP? If so can you confirm your not seeing any tracking codes? I kind of doubt they’d have them, but I’m not a gmail user so I can’t check for myself.
It’s more likely that they’d include tracking identifiers in official google communications to users, but it’s just a guess.
Ah, the ISP NAT.
Well when IPv6 ….. NAT is apparently a No-No.
We shall have to see how widespread NAT is when we are all running IPv6… and the hackers have run their port scans and other hacking tools on everything you run on your networks.
Ah. Haven’t used a desktop email client in ages.
Thuderbird works well with gmail addresses. How that affects privacy, tracking, and advertising data I don’t know.
Unfortunately not signing in doesn’t prevent them tracking you. Every page with Analytics or a G+ button will return your IP address for them to correlate against other sites you’ve visited. If your IP address changes they can reconnect it using cookies. There are certainly ways to avoid it (blocking cookies, blocking Google domains, etc.) but you can be sure they’re using multiple methods.
Google (amongst others) isn’t above using quite devious techniques to track users: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405297020488040457722538045659…
Maybe opting-out of targeted advertising would work though?: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en
Those are easily blocked with Ghostery. Could google use a work-around, I have no idea.
I think the biggest reason to be signed in comes down to use of multiple devices. I can sync bookmarks because I’m logged in. If I have a tab open on my computer I can get to it on my phone, laptop or tablet because I’m logged in. I can easily make a playlist of youtube videos on a computer and then watch it on TV. It goes on and on like that.
I’ve used duck duck go exclusively the past year and am not switching back.
The ddg results may be less comprehensive, but are also less skewed and I am confident I am not being tracked in nasty ways.
Go duck!
Fortunately the Gmail app for Android is extendable and allows the use of third-party filters… oh yeah that’s not true.
Enjoy your “easy to use, simple software”.
I would never ever pay for a ‘service’ that I have no way to verify and that is guaranteed to be offended anyway by Google.
Use Google search via a proxy/anonymizer otherwise just stop using their stuff. Yes I know that for some this may be easir said that done but it can be done unless you are wedded to Android then you have to have some exposure.
Rather sad that they feel thatthey have to do this sort of stuff but their shareholder are pressing for more and more profits (just like Apple seems to be delivering every quarter).