Are People Losing Trust in Google?
What does the shady mortgage company Countrywide and Google have in common? Both of these companies have lost the trust factor. The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe have published a list of the top 20 most trusted companies and Google, like Countrywide has fallen off the list. The article says the following:
The Ponemon Institute got 6,500 people – weighted by age, gender and household income to match the U.S. census – to name the five companies they trusted most and least.
Concern about privacy is higher than ever, the survey showed. Less than half of consumers – 45 percent – feel they have control over their personal information. That’s down from 48 percent last year and 56 percent in 2006.
More than 60 percent said identity theft negatively affects how they think about a company, and more than half get concerned when a company sends notifications of data breaches.
Personal information is both precious to the consumer but it is also sought after by the search engines and very aggressively by Google. XMCP at Slightly Shady SEO did a post last month titled “Google’s User Data Empire“. In his post he outlines a bunch of Google’s services and how they can be used to track a user and gather information on them. The services he lists are as follows:
- Adsense
- Analytics
- GMail
- Chrome – Google’s internet browser, like Firefox and Internet Explorer
- Google Toolbar
- Android – Google’s mobile operating system
There are more than just the ones listed but these are some of the bigger services offered by Google. Think about the implications of these services. Google can potentially know where you are and what you are doing based on these services (Android can use Google Maps which can get your GPS location and log what you are searching for, Chinese food for lunch eh?). Google could then serve advertisiments to you based on this information. How much of this information will they give to their thir party advertisers when Google wants to dive deeper into behaviorial ads?
From an advertisers perspective this information is like gold. You know who your target audience is and you can then target it exactly with this type of information. There is a book, “Going Wireless” and in the book it talks about advertising and the mobile implications. Depending on device and personal settings, advertisers might be able to push ads to your handset. Imaging driving past Chipotle (one of my favortire restaurants by the way) and it is somewhere between 11 AM and 1 PM. How likely are you to stop if a promotional coupon for $1 off a burrito just got pushed to your Android powered phone? Heck, I would! Its lunch time and thats a pretty good deal. That could make or break my decision for lunch right there. I could have had Wendy’s on my mind but because I got that coupon, I’m now changing course. To me, thats awesome marketing because it delivers what I want, when I need it most.
It will be interesting to see where things go from here and how they continue to develop. Being in the SEO industry, it gives you an interesting perspective, because I’m not sure all the time which side of the fence I sit on. Do I want Google to offer these products to me free of charge but then be served targeted ads, or do I want my information kept from them so they don’t use it against me?
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