Microsoft Seeks to Use Application and Hard Drive Data to Sell Ads

Taking contextual advertising to the next logical level, it has been reported that a recent patent filing indicates Microsoft want to develop an advertising framework that uses applications and data on one's computer, rather than one's actions on the Web,…

Google’s Peter Fleischer is Dangerously Misleading on Privacy and Personalized Search

I'm supposed to be on vacation this week, but felt compelled to blog about this... There has been increased attention lately about Google's data retention policies and the impact its drive towards personalization might have on user privacy. In response,…

Consumers Willing to Trade Privacy for Personalization, Survey Says

A new study by ChoiceStream, a (surprise!) provider of online personalization products, announces their latest personalization survey reveals an increasing number of web users are willing to provide personal information in order to receive personalized services. From the summary at…

Google Personalized Search: Who Owns the Profiles?

John Battelle repeats an important concern regarding the extensive profiles search engine providers, like Google, are amassing on each user. He quotes Greg Linden's reaction to a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system: One tidbit I found curious…

Google’s Schmidt: “Google knows a lot about the person surfing”

At a roundtable lunch with reporters, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt remarked that he "expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time," noting specifically that "Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot…