“Google, following in Facebook’s footsteps, wants to sell users’ endorsements to marketers to help them hawk their wares,” Claire Cain Miller and Vindu Goel report for The New York Times.
“On Friday, Google announced an update to its terms of service that allows the company to include adult users’ names, photos and comments in ads shown across the Web, based on ratings, reviews and posts they have made on Google Plus and other Google services like YouTube,” Miller and Goel report. “When the new ad policy goes live Nov. 11, Google will be able to show what the company calls shared endorsements on Google sites and across the Web, on the more than two million sites in Google’s display advertising network, which are viewed by an estimated one billion people.”
“If a user follows a bakery on Google Plus or gives an album four stars on the Google Play music service, for instance, that person’s name, photo and endorsement could show up in ads for that bakery or album. Google said it would give users the chance to opt out of being included in the new endorsements, and people under the age of 18 will automatically be excluded,” Miller and Goel report. “If a Google Plus user has shared comments with a limited set of people, only people in that circle will see the personalized ads. Ratings and reviews on services like Google Plus Local are automatically public and can be used in ads, unless a user opts out of shared endorsements.”
Miller and Goel report, “Currently, Google does not have an ad unit incorporating more social data ready to be used by advertisers, the company said. Instead, the company wants the ability to create such an ad unit in the future and is notifying users in advance.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: 9to5Mac. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]