The kind of power that Google has in the world can be quite scary if you think about it. The fact of the matter is that Google has access to a great deal of data about you, information that you would ideally want to keep as private as possible. As a result of the fact that Google possesses so much information about you, people often use the platform to advertise, and this can be particularly unnerving when you think about things like political ads.
However, Google is taking steps to ensure that political ad targeting will be limited in a lot of ways. The way thing used to work before was that an organization could make political ads based on your publicly available voting history and the like. This was done in order to sway voters as well as potentially end up making them vote a certain way.
Google will now not be letting organizations and advertisers target voters in this way. Instead they will be restricted to things like gender, age and zip code. Targeting people based on political affiliation puts a little too much power in the hands of the organizations that are doing all of this advertising, and since false political ads have started to become far more prominent and widespread on internet than they used to be it has become more important than ever to restrict the amount of targeting that political organizations can end up doing at any given point in time all in all.
Following the enormous backlash Facebook has received in recent times due to the political ads that it has allowed on its platform, it’s understandable that Google would want to cover all of its bases. An added benefit is that this is going to help consumers get a more balanced experience when it comes to ads, one that won’t leave them manipulated in any way.
Photo: Reuters Staff / Reuters
Read next: DeepMind powering the Google Play Store’s app recommendation system is the News of the Week
However, Google is taking steps to ensure that political ad targeting will be limited in a lot of ways. The way thing used to work before was that an organization could make political ads based on your publicly available voting history and the like. This was done in order to sway voters as well as potentially end up making them vote a certain way.
Google will now not be letting organizations and advertisers target voters in this way. Instead they will be restricted to things like gender, age and zip code. Targeting people based on political affiliation puts a little too much power in the hands of the organizations that are doing all of this advertising, and since false political ads have started to become far more prominent and widespread on internet than they used to be it has become more important than ever to restrict the amount of targeting that political organizations can end up doing at any given point in time all in all.
Following the enormous backlash Facebook has received in recent times due to the political ads that it has allowed on its platform, it’s understandable that Google would want to cover all of its bases. An added benefit is that this is going to help consumers get a more balanced experience when it comes to ads, one that won’t leave them manipulated in any way.
- Also read: Google News goes ‘Beyond the Headlines’
Photo: Reuters Staff / Reuters
Read next: DeepMind powering the Google Play Store’s app recommendation system is the News of the Week
