In the Q&A after his speech Tuesday night at PFF’s Aspen Summit, one of the questions with which Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was clearly most voluble and at ease dealt with the market for advertising. He rightly touted how Google has paid out billions of dollars to small and medium-size businesses, users of Google’s AdSense program. (Full disclosure: A project of mine, WashingtonWatch.com, is one.) And, without giving away the Google playbook, he discussed some of the directions Google’s advertising efforts will be going.
Along with newspaper advertising, he spent a good deal of time discussing location-based advertising. He enthused about the possibility of all those mobile computers people carry (still often called “phones”) helping people find the things they need as they move from place to place.
For example, Schmidt talked about how he could be driving down the street and get directions for all the places to eat in a given area. Because he had eaten pizza the night before, his phone might direct him to a burger joint. And then, Schmidt hastily added, he would turn off his phone.
I have complimented Google here for the small steps – baby steps, if you will – that it has taken recently in the privacy area. Small steps are better than no steps, and hopefully they presage more and better.
But, as he tacitly acknowledged, Schmidt’s vision for location-based ad-targeting faces formidable privacy challenges. The deep wells of data Google has about users would deepen far further if search, communication, and other data were added to real-time location data. In the face of such surveillance, users would, like Schmidt, turn off their phones.
Google needs to develop breakthrough privacy protections – jaw-dropping, shoulda-thoughta-that privacy protections – if location-based ad targeting is going to get traction. Without it, the company’s investments in a wireless network through which to reach customers, and a location-based ad-targeting system to serve them, could go down as one of tech’s most colossal flops.
Those privacy baby-steps Google has taken? Schmidt needs to make sure he doesn’t run the baby down in his car.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.