Gmail Reveals Browsing History to Contacts as Ad Links
updates at the end of the article.
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We all know that Gmail scans your email messages for key words to display related ad links right next to your correspondence if you use the browser to access your Gmail account. Now, it looks like the ad giant might be doing more than just scanning your email messages.
An email from a friend in Taiwan who also uses Gmail arrived in my mailbox today. I don’t normally look at the ads displayed but I was taking a break from my thesis and was probably just looking for some distraction. As my eyes drifted to the ad links something caught my attention. The first two ads: “get to know Jesus” and “can our sins really be forgiven?”. OK, I thought, the standard Christmas ads. The third ad: “apartment near Hualien for rent: university in vicinity…”. Hmm…we’ve never written about Hualien or renting a flat, so where does this come from? But wait…she did tell me that she had been looking to buy a new apartment back in April. And didn’t she convert to Christianity last year?? I looked at the next ad: “International Business Management Seminar”. Again something we’ve never written about, but it does sound like something my friend might look up. The only thing we’ve been writing back and forth about is our friend in Malaysia. If Google’s only scanning our correspondence, I don’t see the relevance of these ads. If anything they look more like a summary of what my friend might have been browsing these days.
To confirm my suspicion, I wrote my friend in Taiwan and asked her to send me the list of ad links displayed on my message to her. She did.
Two ads were about baby care - our friend in Malaysia has just given birth to a babe girl. Nothing out of the ordinary. The first two ads, however, almost made me jump: “ringtones for Nokia mobile phones”, and “Asus laptop with Intel Centrino processor”. I have, as a matter of fact, been googling and reading about my Motorola Ming, and yes, I have also been googling and reading everything about the Asus eee laptop! These have never been the subjects of our conversation, and my friend assured me, when I called her on the phone, that she had never googled or visited websites about Nokia, or cellphones, or Asus, or laptops.
How long has Google been doing this? Shouldn’t Google have notified their Gmail users? Or has this already been public knowledge and I’ve just been living in a cave?
I’m asking my other Gmail contacts to send me the ads they see. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google is indeed tracking every Gmail user’s googling history, turning your browsing habits into ad links, displaying them not only to you, but also to your Gmail-using friends. Bravo Google, you sure are helping us get to know our friends even better behind their back!
Update: This just in - about 20 minutes later after I posted this article, written while logged in to my Gmail account, my friend sent me another list of ads: again 3 of them are about baby care. One is about Asus job opportunities (which I’ve indeed accessed SEVERAL times while reading about the eee laptop on their website and that must’ve been about a week or two ago) and another one about proofreading your THESIS…
More Update: More ads sent in by another friend 15 minutes after the first update: “Google is hiring”? I clicked on the exact ad link last week. “Virtual PROOFING system”, “AD bags confidential” and “market TRACK, LLC” all contain words I used in this article, written less than half an hour ago, and I’m still logged in to Gmail right now. I’ve NEVER talked about ads or market tracking or any kind of system with this particular friend. Go figure!
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