Say “Hello” to Your Big Brother: Google

Time may be the most valuable resource on earth. Consumers today want what they want … yesterday. Companies are faced, daily, with the challenge of knowing their customers well enough to deliver. The Internet has created an active, intelligent and data-driven environment where companies and consumers alike can share and collect an overwhelming abundance of accessible insight, analytics, preferences and reviews in real time. According to Benady (2012), "Some in the industry predict that online monitoring technology will develop in accuracy and effectiveness over the next five years to such an extent that it will become an indispensable part of marketing." One company that is ahead of the curve in data collection and data-driven marketing is the true big brother of the Internet…the boy next door...Google.

According to Google, I am a woman between the ages of 25 and 34 who speaks English as her primary language and has made over 1,000 searches just this week for things such as ISU football schedules, fitness plans and “superhero who wears blue”.  I like Christmas, grammar rules and historical landmarks. Oh, and I spend my 30-45 minutes of free time each week watching movie trailers and Boxers jumping on trampolines on YouTube.

I don’t eat dinner across the table from a Google employee or sit at a desk at night filling out surveys to share these details with Google myself. As I am searching Google, YouTube and using Chrome, it turns out they’re searching me too. This is not new news. In fact, it’s been around a lot longer than we’ve all been aware. According to Wallace (2014), “Disable cookies from your browser and you won't be able to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and many otherwise free digital services. That's because these platforms are not free. We all exchange our data for the service, and in turn receive more targeted ads based on who our friends are, what we say to them in email, who we retweet most often and what keywords are typically found in our digital resumes.” For the most part, data collection is done with YOU the consumer in mind in order to serve banner ads, search results, news and videos that are relevant to you – saving you time and providing value in your online experience.

Google happened to find that not only is this valuable experience of relevance important to consumers, but also to businesses. Consumers are more likely to click on a banner ad or search result they’re actually looking for – it seems like common sense, right? So why not make money from serving these great results? This is the question Google has led the way in answering as they build a profile based on your email content and web browsing habits, monetize your purchase information from the iStore and storage devices such as iPhone and iCloud. Google’s personalized experience is so successful that with the launch of the Nexus 5 they built the Google Experience Launcher (‘GEL’) into the Google Search allowing access to anyone. According to Kelly (2014), “regardless of whether you own a phone or tablet made by Samsung, HTC , Motorola, Acer , Asus, ZTE , Huawei or anyone else, you can now get that Nexus 5 look and feel and wave goodbye to TouchWiz, HTC Sense and other third party skins.”

Privacy is a right. Consumer privacy, then, refers to both physical space and information. According to Caudill and Murphy (2000), consumer privacy is on a continuum suggesting "that consumers have varying degrees of concern with privacy and place different values on their personal information." Where many consumers online willingly complete form fills, accept sharing information from Facebook and save their credit card information; others will shy away from these actions and therefore purchases or participation in research due to the collection of their private information. Google has had to manage consumer privacy vs. business ethics vs. business success since the beginning. According to Fran Hawthorne, US author of Ethical Chic:

Consumer pressure has definitely made online companies more sensitive to ethical issues like the environment, human rights, and privacy. In terms of privacy: Apple itself in 2011 had to back off from an effort in which iPhones and iPads were secretly collecting information on users' locations. There are a lot of reasons, including the Google 'right to be forgotten' ruling, the furore over Google Earth, the NSA revelations, fear of hacking, and I think, consumers just getting fed up with ads. (Channel 4 News, 2014)

Apple’s newest privacy statement addresses the consumer pressure and takes a shot right at Google’s methods directly from Tim Cook himself:

We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t "monetize" the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.

Cook recognizes the recent privacy concerns with Target credit card hacks and private celebrity photo stealing and addresses the trust a consumer should have for Apple over Google head on. Fair play Mr. Cook, but Google responds too. Apple has also created search engine DuckDuckGo which “doesn't track your searches or mine your data for advertising or other purposes…[however] it doesn't rival Google when it comes to providing answers to questions right at the top of its results” (Channel 4 News, 2014).

Notable efforts from Apple don’t go unnoticed, but neither do Google’s efforts to continually address these issues as well. This year the European Court of Justice made the “right to be forgotten” decision ruling that “search engines with European domains – such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo – must allow EU and European Economic Area citizens the ability to remove links to personal information that is ‘inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant’” (Stern, 2014). Comprising 90 percent of the search volume in Europe, Google holds the burden most of responding to this request. I question if it is even possible to truly erase something once it has been posted. Even SnapChat that supposedly erases its servers every 24 hours and immediately after a viewed image or video to an individual, I question its validity. Dr. Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at Oxford University validates my questions in his findings that “the information remains there for anyone who wants to find it by added means’ pointing out that currently anyone can simply use the core google.com domain to access the links, rather than Europe-specific domains such as Google.uk or Google.de. ‘It’s almost like taking aspirin when you have a bad toothache. That can help momentarily but the problem’s there. You need to go to the dentist’” (Stern, 2014).

I argue that the invite must also be honest about the value to the consumer in participating and sharing private information (i.e. purchase, location, profile, etc.). This leans to an ethical issue of a social contract in online marketing research. According to Caudill and Murphy (2000), "consumers opt in to a particular activity from which they perceive future information streams will be of value." If it were more clear to a consumer how the collected information from search data to purchase data was being used, and by who, in order to give them what they are looking for more quickly at a later date, the social contract would be fulfilled. The question remains if it is truly as clear as it sounds…and, unfortunately; it is just not that simple. I am constantly telling potential and confused clients "its very big brother" in explaining the data available to us to serve ads across an ad exchange.

References

Benady, D. (2012). The world’s biggest focus group. Marketing, 35-37.

Brandom, Russell. (2014, September 18). Apple’s privacy statement is a direct shot at google and I love it. The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6409915/apples-privacy-statement-is-a-direct-shot-at-google-and-i-love-it

Caudill, Eve M. and Murphy, Patrick E. (2000). Consumer online privacy: legal and ethical issues. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 19(1), 7-19. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30000483

Channel 4 News. (2014, June 4). Is apple teaching google a lesson in internet ethics? Retrieved from http://www.channel4.com/news/apple-bing-duckduckgo-google-search-engine-online-privacy

Kelly, Gordon. (2014, January 9). Google experience launcher an easy hack to get the look of the nexus 5 on your phone or tablet. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/01/09/google-experience-launcher-an-easy-hack-to-get-the-look-of-the-nexus-5-on-any-android-phone-or-tablet/

Stern, Rachel. (2014, November 21). Google loses ground in fight against europe’s ‘right to be forgotten’. The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/1121/Google-loses-ground-in-fight-against-Europe-s-right-to-be-forgotten

Wallace, Tracey. (2014, November 3). The ethics of data, visualized [Infographic]. Smart Data Collective. Retrieved from http://smartdatacollective.com/tracey-wallace/279421/ethics-data-visualized-infographic