Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in <certain medication>, Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has <medical problem>.
Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?
> Technically, when an AdSense client targets their ads only to North American users who expressed an interest in <certain medication>, Google didn’t “sell that user’s personal information,” but… whomever is on the other side of that ad, once clicked — and their partners — have just paid Google to find a user who likely has <medical problem>.
> Isn’t that selling personal information? Actually, if not legally?
No. Its selling the service of advertising to people for whom some fact holds.
The rest is assumption on the part of the party purchasing the advertising based on the fact of that purchase and behavior in response to the advertising. The response to the advertising is what provides personal information, just as it is in the case of nontargetted advertising in offline media where the advertising includes a call to action which is directed (through the content of the add rather than user-specific targeting) to people for whom certain facts hold.
Unless you are going to argue that everyone who sells advertising space to people who include a call to action that involves a response to the party purchasing the advertising is "selling personal information" since they are selling advertisers a mechanism by which a message to can be sent to which the response can be used to deduce personal information, then, no, what Google is doing isn't selling personal information.
"People for whom some fact holds" IS the very definition of personal information.
What's missing from the GP's example is showing the ad for medication to the same user on a later unrelated search. On any given search, I would expect an ad-sponsored search provider to give me ads related to the current search term. If the seach provider stores my search history and serves me ads from previous search terms, that is personal information being sold, in my opinion.
> "People for whom some fact holds" IS the very definition of personal information.
Yes, but selling the service of showing something to those people isn't selling personal information, because the entity selling the service keeps the personal information and uses it on behalf of the entity purchasing the service.
Selling personal information is disclosure. Selling a service in which the seller uses personal information to provide the service is use. There is a meaningful difference between an entity using personal information and an entity disclosing personal information to third parties. There can be legitimate grounds to be concerned about either, but its not helpful to conflate them.
No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.
That is a false equivalency.
I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google. Of course I consider my criticism to be broad enough to apply to similar situations involving other ad networks (and to Facebook), but we are discussing specifically Google’s privacy policy.
> No, you’re saying that filtering people == having a call to action.
No, I'm saying that the personal information that the advertisers get is what they deduce from the response to the call to action. Filtering who sees the ad (among other functions, this isn't actually the most important) serves a mechanism to attempt to shape the pool of people who respond to the call to action, but its not really different (in terms of the advertiser being able to derive personal information) from the use of the actual content of the ad to influence which people who are exposed to it will respond.
> I’m also not sure if you are attempting to attack me for only discussing Google.
Pointing out errors in your argument isn't attacking you. And, to be sure, the errors in your argument have nothing to do with the fact that it references Google, but with the fact that it posits a false equivalency between selling personal information and selling target advertising placement based on the fact that advertisers can derive personal information from the active responses of advertising viewers to the calls to action in targetted ads.
