The Dark Side of Search Engine Marketing: How and Why Google Collects Our Personal Information

Original author: Patrick Berlinquette Follow
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When a lazy journalist is beset by gloomy forebodings about Alexa from Amazon or Google Home, he writes something in the spirit: “Even Orwell could not have expected that we would invite Big Brother to our home.” At the same time, he misses one important point: virtual assistants are not the first time that we were ready to exchange privacy for convenience. It all started back in the early 2000s, when people in exchange for access to Google products and more targeted advertising posted the company all the information about themselves.



Today, Google delivers to marketers (for example, me) your personal data in such volumes that we can extract more from it than from recordings from any camera or microphone. Marketers like me have never had such a wide opportunity to benefit from user information.

Currently every secondGoogle receives 40,000 searches, or 3.5 billion a day and 1.2 trillion a year. When you drive something into Google, your request is sent to the data center, where a thousand computers select the results and send you the final result. The whole procedure usually takes less than a fifth of a second. But here is what most people don’t suspect: in parallel with this “behind the scenes” another, even more lightning-fast and mysterious process takes place - an auction unfolds there.

Any search phrase contains keywords, and people who are engaged in advertising struggle with each other to secure the keys that you just entered. Every advertiser offering a product that is somehow related to your request wants you to see exactly his ad and click.

And finally, advertisements occupy their final positions, like toys in cartoons, hurriedly returning to their places a second before the lights turn on - and the results page is loaded.

As a rule, the first four results (that is, what you see on the screen without scrolling) are always paid advertising. If you did not suspect this, then you are not alone. More than half of users between the ages of 18 and 34 cannot distinguishorganic issuance of advertisements. After 35 years, the percentage begins to grow proportionally. Google itself is making efforts to ensure that there are as many such people as possible, trying various options for advertising design that visually merges with relevant results.

As soon as you click on an advertisement, your personal information is immediately transferred to marketers working with a search engine and stored on their AdWords account forever, without the possibility of deletion.

In case you suddenly have a miracle, it’s easy on your soul - holidays on the nose and all that - I present a complete list of what Google knows about you in December 2018 (and accordingly, all the parameters by which it tracks):

  • Age
  • Income level
  • Floor
  • The presence or absence of children
  • Marital status / serious relationship
  • Pageview history (both recent and long-term)
  • Devices (phones, tablets, computers, televisions)
  • Geographic location
  • Age of children (infant, preschooler, etc.)
  • Success in High School
  • Academic qualifications
  • What time of day do you use Google
  • Languages ​​you speak
  • Recent major events in life
  • Property rights to housing
  • The topics of the sites you visit and the context of the visit
  • Products you buy
  • Products you almost bought
  • A kind of wi-fi
  • Distance to the nearest cell tower
  • Application Installation History
  • The amount of time you spend in a particular application
  • operating system
  • Email Content
  • The amount of time that you spend on certain sites
  • Movements in space (for example, moving to another apartment)
  • Movements in space (for example, a train ride)

From the very first day you started using Google, your “personal file” began to form there, which includes, in particular:


In 2019, we will come closer to the cherished dream of any search service - multi-device attribution. When this technology is implemented, advertising will pursue the user easily and naturally, following him not only from channel to channel (for example, from social networks to organic delivery or to a mailbox), but also from device to device (say, from a phone to the tablet, from there to the laptop, then to the TV and desktop computer).

For example: based on your loyalty to one or another brand, your TV will send a high-frequency signal when broadcasting certain commercials. For an imperfect human hearing, it will be indistinguishable, but a cell phone located at a short distance will catch it. Accordingly, if you see Nike ads on TV, take the phone and google “Nike sneakers,” the conversion chain from the TV to the phone will be fixed. Not bad!

If you go a long way to work every day, marketers are already up to date and show you ads for products that are relevant to such a schedule. For example, headphones, frayed leather laptop bags and handkerchiefs that drown out your husky sobs. But how do they know that you are far away? Very simple: towers along the route pick up the signal frequency of your phone. If the pings quickly follow one after another, the marketer may conclude that you are inside an object that is moving at high speed with few stops (well, or if it is a Long Island railway, then with constant stops, haha).

Drive the product into the search engine, and then kick it into the store. If you did this in this order, most likely Google, thanks to the GPS data from the phone, associated your click on the advertising link with a purchase in the store.

To provide marketers with even more information about offline purchases, Google has acquired ( for large millions ) MasterCard credit card information. The company acknowledged that it has access to approximately 70% of its debit and credit card transactions in the United States through its "partnership with third parties." Someday we will look back and this number will seem to us non-trivial.

Back in 2008, Hal Roberts, a guy from the Berkman Klein Internet and Society Center at Harvard, calledGoogle Ads is a "gray observation method." He defined Google as a “collective intelligence system” that collects our data and takes advantage of it. That's just, unlike other forms of surveillance, Google does not threaten us with murder or imprisonment.

The “grayness” of the method is that, according to Roberts, it is difficult to identify the benefits that it brings to the corporation at the individual level. But even then he "played a key role in shaping online public discourse." Now, ten years later, it’s even harder to notice the exploitation of data in Google Ads. Observation has leaked to almost all areas of our lives, and yet, little information is available to the general public about the situation.

In 2019, I would like to change this state of affairs.

In this series of articles I intend to state everything that I know about the dark side of promotion through search engines. I will explain in simple words what is happening “under the hood” and how Google and Google Ads track data.

Then, as a person who saw it all from the inside, I will tell you some nuances unknown to most ordinary users: how search marketing experts abuse the capabilities of Google Ads and use the platform, in fact, to buy and sell customers. I’ll also touch on how Google tried to fix the situation. Finally, I’ll list the steps readers can take to protect themselves from abuse by Google, including ways to claim the right to dispose of their data from unscrupulous advertisers and marketers who play dishonestly.

Today people are recognized by Google in things that are kept secret from everyone else - even spouses, doctors or psychologists. But they would not have shown such frankness if they had realized the depth of this rabbit hole. I hope that my insider information will help them return to other exits for their fears, regrets, hopes and desires.

By the end of the series, readers will be armed with the information necessary to restructure their relationship with Google. And if someone decides to leave it as their main search engine, they can build the process so that the person uses the search engine, and not vice versa.

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