If you’re worried that visiting our website will reveal preferences and predilections you’d prefer to keep private, be aware that soon Google will be watching you and you may find yourself the target of Google-sponsored ads. Unfortunately, you may not find refuge at other websites – they too will be monitoring you. Behavioral targeting is coming to the Web.

What this means is that every time you visit a website that carries Google ads you will be creating a cookie that serves as a kind of spoor enabling Google to analyze and categorize your tastes. Whereupon, as described by the New York Times‘s Miguel Helft in Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests, “Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting.” Google has blocked out some 600 categories of interest in 20 broad groups, and if you’re not sure what categories you fall into, you’ll find out soon enough when ads start popping up that appeal to your preferences. Or at least to what Google infers inferred to be your preferences. Golf? Furs? Sports cars? Triple ply toilet paper? Google is recording your clicks and preparing pop-up pitches.

In its announced initiative Google reassures us that it will not drill too deep into such highly sensitive areas as our sexual orientation or health issues, but just where the line of sensitivity is drawn will be interesting to discover. Users who feel their privacy has been breached will be able to review the information Google has harvested and edit it. Which raises a host of interesting questions, for what’s to prevent users from inventing preferences just to throw Google off track?

Website operators will be free to opt out of the Google program. Publisher sites displaying Google’ AdSense service will have to post a Cookie and Privacy Policy, such as this one sugested by Google:

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
• Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

By way of disclosure, E-Reads does not at this time harvest information about its visitors. However, because we do use AdSense we are obliged to post a cookie and privacy policy in the very near future. Do you have an opinions either way? Let us know in the comments of this post.

RC