Hey Google: Quit stalking me

Google is stalking me. It’s pissing me off.

Of course I’ve only got myself to blame. Sick of Firefox crashing and for some reason unable to download a post-WWII version of Explorer, I’m now using Google Chrome both at home and at work. The world’s premier search engine is not only privy to my every search (it always ways), it can now serve me ads based on information collated from every click in my browser, my Gmail account and my Blogger account that hosts this blog.

As a result, I click through the Venezuelan newspapers online and I’m assaulted by ads for products that, for example, I recently looked at on Amazon. This strikes me as an odd way to seduce a person’s consumer loyalty, more akin to creepy stalking than the casual flirtation that might lead me toward new consumer habits.

Imagine for a moment that I, while in college 15 years ago, had been approached by a woman who said “Brian, I hacked into the library’s IT system and found all the books you’ve checked out. I checked them all out myself, I really love all those books too.” My response would probably have been to communicate something along the lines of “You’re creepy. Please don’t ever talk to me again.”

Now you’d think a woman who’d been privy to this information could have found a more discrete way to use it as a way of sidling up to me. Such as weaving it into a conversation she were already having with me. Or using her inside knowledge of my reading habits to draw my attention to attributes that I’d find attractive. And preferably avoid revealing she did this research until we were already an item, such that it could become an endearing joke. Google, did you ever hit on anyone in college?

Now imagine Stalker Girl said to me “Brian, I saw that you checked out Teach us to Outgrow our Madness, by Kenzaburo Oe. Japanese modernism is so wonderful, I loved that book too.”

OK, yes, I checked that book out of the library. It was possibly the single most depressing thing I’d ever read, with a grotesque cynicism that overwhelmed even my own adolescent darkness. So how do I respond?  “Um yes, but 1) I thought it sucked, and 2) stop stalking me”?

Or what about the following. “Brian, you should really read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Its undercurrents of existential suffering would really match your tastes in literature.” Way to get ahead of the curve here, Stalker Girl – you’ve recommended a book that I’m already reading. You’ve revealed that you’re stalking me while offering me no useful information.

So for example, here’s an image of a Google search I did to find out if Google’s share price is expensive, information that I may or may not use in this post. At the top you’ll see a banner ad, it’s promoting the brand of pants I was wearing while I did the search.

I suppose market research experts would say this would trigger an internal consumption impulse along the lines of “Oh yes, I’m glad you reminded me, I need to buy another pair of those pants.” In fact my reaction is more like “No shit, Sherlock. Now would you please stop peeping?”

The future of internet advertising that was always this glimmering Shangri-La of “smart ads” that would use Amazon-style Bayesian statistics to figure out what I before I knew I wanted it. Those ads would be so much more valuable than those dumb broadsheet newspaper ads that were indiscriminately thrown at me based on no prior knowledge of my consumption habits.

Funny thing, this. As part of ongoing efforts to make myself look a bit more presentable, I was poking around the other day through a list of dozens and dozens of clothing designers. I sifted through several hundred, ignored 95 percent of them, but came across a few that I really liked. This, of course, is precisely the work that the newfangled futuristic internet advertisers are supposed to be doing for me.

By the next day, my stalker friend had gotten wise and I’m all of a sudden seeing some of these brands pop up in Grooveshark ads. But check out Stalker Girl’s recommendations – she’s pitching me clothes from a company called Metropark. Yeah, I flipped through their website, even looked at a couple things. But can we get real for a moment here? Me, corny middle-aged whitey with my bland, inoffensive, heterosexual Gap fashion tastes, am going to get outfitted by a designer that includes “Metro” in its name?

Or how about these ads I get for a service called TransferWise, recommended by my friend GG as a way of making international money transfers across currencies without paying wire fees. I went to the website and checked it out. Cool service, only it’s Europe-based and can’t be used to send dollars, making it utterly useless for me. That hasn’t stopped YouTube from showing their ads every time I pull up a video.   

Yes, I’ve tried opting out. There’s a button at the top of these ads that says “Ad Choices” that’s supposed to let you duck out of these recommended sponsorships, of course with the dire warning that future ads will be much “less interesting.” I clicked on every “get rid of this stuff” box I could find and they’re still serving me all the same things.

I’m fundamentally unconvinced that this is adding value to advertising. Even with the huge amount of data Google has collected about me, I don’t think they can really make ads smarter without my consent and active participation. How else are they going to know that they’re not simply selling me stuff I already have or stuff I already know I don’t want? If I wrote them and said “Hi Google, I’m interested in finding some new threads. Here are five brands of clothes I like and ten I don’t,” both of us would probably benefit. Instead, based on my “consent” which consists of clicking a box under some incomprehensible text, they try to use my clicks as a proxy for my preferences. The result is a high-tech version of the same thing advertising has been since its inception – an annoying cacophony that clobbers people over the head with products that are almost certainly useless to them.

I think someday we might make it into the age of “smart ads.” This is ain’t it.