How Google Tracks Your Personal Information – Member Feature Stories – Medium

Back in December 2008, Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, spoke about Google Ads as a form of “gray surveillance.” Roberts described Google as “a system of collective intelligence” that, along with marketers, hoarded and exploited your data.
But unlike other forms of surveillance, Google couldn’t kill you with it or throw you in jail.
Google Ads was gray surveillance because the exploitation, Roberts said, was hard to detect on the individual level. But, he said, it was already playing “a central role in the creation of social discourse online.” And 10 years later, the exploitation on Google Ads is even harder to detect. Despite the surveillance bleeding into nearly every aspect of our lives, there’s little information available to the public about what’s really going on.

In 2019, I’d like to change that.

People tell Google things they confess nowhere else?—?not to their spouses, doctors, or shrinks.
Through this series, I will reveal everything I know about the dark side of search engine marketing. I will explain, in everyday language, how Google and Google Ads work “under the hood” to track your data....

Read more here: How Google Tracks Your Personal Information – Member Feature Stories – Medium.