Google Backs Off Of Behavioral Tracking

It’s no secret that Google tracks a lot of information about their users. It’s also no secret that many people and organizations are very wary about the type and extent of the information that Google is tracking. The company understands the issues, and says that they’re very sensitive to these types of concern.

Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising, said on Tuesday Google was shying away from the industry race to deliver tools for advertisers that stitch together a user’s various online actions into one profile.

According to Wojcicki, the company looks for patterns in searches, but is steering clear of more intrusive behavioral tracking, which builds a user profile based on what the user searches for, as well as how they use other Google services over time.

That is not something that we have participated in, for a variety of reasons,” Wojcicki told reporters at a briefing at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“We believe that task-based information at the time (of a user’s search) is the most relevant information to what they are looking at,” she said. “We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used.”

She also stated that the company is now tying together Ads based on the current search query as well as the last one.

The rep made sure to indicate that the company isn’t storing this search history.

I find this to be quite interesting, and I would assume that Google is not completely adverse to building such profiles in the future, once regulatory hurdles concerning DoubleClick are cleared.