Google to Psychologically Profile Net Users & Gamers

Google plans to profile players
by David Adam and Bobbie Johnson
May 13, 2007
technology.guardian.co.uk...

INTERNET giant Google has drawn up plans to compile psychological profiles of millions of web users by covertly monitoring the way they play online games.

The patent says Google could also monitor people playing on any game console that hooks up to the internet, including the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox.

What is going on with this country? I used to hold Google in high regard when I heard that they wouldn't release search data to the government saying:
www.iht.com...

"the request is unnecessary, overly broad, would be onerous to comply with, would jeopardize its trade secrets and could expose identifying information about its users."

Does Google really want to sell our profiles to advertisers? Or are they just exploiting the Constitutional Ripple of the Patriot Act?

Could Google have possibly teamed up with the U.S. government to create a crude form of Minority Report to help the government find the next Eric Harris or Seung-Hui Cho before such tragedies take place?

[edit on 15-5-2007 by tyranny22]

No replies? No flags?

Has the general American population so subcomed to the "fear" and "terror" tactics of the government that we longer care about the rights that were once a staple in the way of American life?

Do people no longer care about invasion of privacy for the advancement of media advertising?!

Come on people, at least reply that you honestly don't care if Google gathers user's profile information and sells it to the highest bidder, if that's your opinion. But, please don't ignore this issue.

I'm a very paranoid Man, but have often suspected things such as this were already happening. I've no doubt the main factor behind this data gathering would be to obtain commercial gain, but imagine all the nefarious purposes it could be utilised for. If somebody started putting various tests within the games, they could be running experiments on us and gathering the data. Now that games are becoming so realistic the possibilities are very dark.

tyranny22
Has the general American population so subcomed to the "fear" and "terror" tactics of the government that we longer care about the rights that were once a staple in the way of American life?

Apparently this is not strictly an American issue, Tyranny22. The article states the patent was filed by Google in Europe as well as the United States.

I sometimes wonder what Google really is...

Originally posted by Nobusuke Tagomi
Apparently this is not strictly an American issue, Tyranny22. The article states the patent was filed by Google in Europe as well as the United States.

I sometimes wonder what Google really is...

Good point. I wonder how this action will be perceived in the European community. The Partiot Act was designed to admend the U.S. Constitution and I have no doubt that these patents were a direct result of this doctrine.

I have no idea about other countries "Constitutions" or whatever they may called the statements of their rights, but I would imagine that each would have a clause about rights to privacy in each. How would Google be able to bypass other countries laws of privacy in order to "covertly" implement user profiling?

From my 10+ years of involvement in advertising and psychographics, I tend not to see this as anything terribly concerning (yet).

This proposed technology isn't able to determine exactly who is doing what, only what a certain type of person (gamer) is likely to do, because they did A, B, and C online.

The technology behind discount cards for supper markets and drug stores is FAR MORE personally intrusive, tracks the spending habits of identifiable persons, and creates startlingly accurate psychographic profiles of individuals which are sold to anyone that will buy them.

This concept from Google (as presented) is not yet capable of saying that Mr. Bob Smith gamer does A, B, and then will likely do C... it's your local super market that does that.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
From my 10+ years of involvement in advertising and psychographics, I tend not to see this as anything terribly concerning (yet).

This proposed technology isn't able to determine exactly who is doing what, only what a certain type of person (gamer) is likely to do, because they did A, B, and C online.

The technology behind discount cards for supper markets and drug stores is FAR MORE personally intrusive, tracks the spending habits of identifiable persons, and creates startlingly accurate psychographic profiles of individuals which are sold to anyone that will buy them.

This concept from Google (as presented) is not yet capable of saying that Mr. Bob Smith gamer does A, B, and then will likely do C... it's your local super market that does that.

Very interesting. Good to get some info from someone with a demo/psychographic background.

Do you think that a supermarket such as Kroger would deal in a more personal profile? I rarely ever carry cash, which means that I use my debit card almost everywhere I go. As well, I have a "Kroger Plus" card that I scan to get a few cents off this and that. I've know for years that Kroger was using psychographic analysis from the info I provided to get my Plus Card. Do you think this is going to become a major tend everywhere includeing credit card companies?

I don't mind so much that Google would monitor my game play and sell the relative info of "this type of player" to the interested party, but what I do worry about is whether Joe Blow in sitting on the other side of cyber space saying, "oohhhh! he just purposely shot his teammate execution style! Better flag him and report him to NSA." But, I guess like you said, the technology is probably not there yet?

Kroker is most certainly selling your profile.

Nearly all grocery stores and national drug stores use variations of technology originally developed out of Rochester, NY. A little-known firm, "JTS Checkout Solutions" (now defunct) was spun-off from a very large/advanced local supermarket, Wegmans. Back in the early 1990's, they solved a long list of tracking, profiling, and database issues to enable sophisticated customer profiling of those using the shopping chards. The intent was/is two-fold 1) be able to target specific offers to your needs (those flyers typically come in dozens of versions, each for a specific psychographic profile, and 2) be able to sell amazingly valuable consumer purchase data. Typically, the money they make from selling the database far offsets the discounts you're offered.

The "private sector" data mining from these cards and credit card purchase patters is mind-numbingly deep, accurate, and personal. All of it is available to anyone with the ability to pay for it.

so these profiles are on a per person basis? meaning they are tailored to "John Doe"?

is this not, or rather, was this not an invasion of privacy ... or was this right waivered when you signed the terms and conditions on the Plus Card agreement?

I can understand how supermarkets are able to do this with a signed contract (whether or not the individual actually reads the agreement), but I disagree with Google being able to do this "convertly" without consent of the general public.

Originally posted by tyranny22
so these profiles are on a per person basis? meaning they are tailored to "John Doe"?

Yes. This is what makes the specific data valuable.

but I disagree with Google being able to do this "convertly" without consent of the general public.

But Google isn't getting personal, only compiling behavior data on specific groups of people. It's not much different (in theory) than the traffic data we get from Google Analytics... it shows patterns, not people.

But can we trust Google to be so broad-based in their profiling and not so individually specific? Who's to monitor and regulate the information they gather? I have no clue – maybe the technology is not yet up to that kind of data gathering.

I ask this because I'm not entirely convinced that the government will use their proposed "National I.D. Cards" for the sole purpose of providing a better Driver's License or improved security measures for Airports and Federal buildings. Seems like a huge risk for the public to accept these profiling efforts and have them later run rampant with other more specific personal information gathering.

wow now if this happens this whole big brother life style is really coming into its own, i think some one needs to start a new search engine, 100% "secure" one.

okay, so maybe I'm beating a dead horse.

but, worse case scenerio:

Google is granted this patent unchallenged. 5 years down the road they've adapted new technology and data gathering scripting to a point that they're linking together e-mail accounts with other website based accounts.

Imagine if Google embedded each of their search engines (just like the one found on this site) with spyware to track and link all WTC Conspiracy believers and turned over this information to the government branches responsible for internet monitoring and you were flagged and labeled a "domestic threat"? Next thing you know your phones are tapped, all e-mails logged and your web usage is monitored. All of a sudden you could no longer log on to Al Jazeera to brush up on the latest happenings in the Muslim world.

To be honest... I don't think this will ever work.

People will end up in jail for no reason (or stupid assumptions)... Take a family home for example. The father buys a MMO and plays it for a while (then NSA, or whoever gets his profile)... After a while his son/daughter finds this game quite amusing and starts playing it (on their father's account)... then there is another personality and later "they" will classify the father as bi-polar/schizophrenic/etc (depends on the children's behaviour in the game).

And some people have different behaviours during certain games... FPS games can make people more aggressive (because of frustration or irritated, or whatever, during a match/game)... take those same people and let them play something else, like a strategy, and they won't become so aggressive (they'll either: not care, or find it quite funny, or excited,etc.).

Another point... and everybody knows this problem... PIRACY. I don't think I need to explain this one.

My 2 cents

I don't care much about this news at all. I am (was) a big fan of Google. Their stance on privacy earned them (in some degree) my trust.

I use google as my home page, all search I do is through google. I even use Gmail. But now, I'm going to have to look for another search engine and email provider.

This is very unfortunate. You never know who will get a hold of the data they collect. No server is invincible.

Originally posted by Frontkjemper
I don't care much about this news at all. I am (was) a big fan of Google. Their stance on privacy earned them (in some degree) my trust.

I use google as my home page, all search I do is through google. I even use Gmail. But now, I'm going to have to look for another search engine and email provider.

This is very unfortunate. You never know who will get a hold of the data they collect. No server is invincible.

I'm in the same boat. Google homepage and gmail as well. I felt betrayed when I heard this news. shame on googles exploitation of it's users.

Personally speaking the only online web games I play are mahjong and probably some stunt dirt bike game. As for mmo I am a WoW addict so is my wife and my son plays as well. What type of relevant info can be gathered from playing WoW 6 hours a day? Just basically that I kill cow people trolls and orcs, and that I mine fish and am a blacksmith?? I honestly don’t know but heck I’m not going to stop playing WoW because of this and if the want to target advertisements for a mahjong set or dirt bike my way…well poo.



btw- HI im totally new here so hi

Originally posted by ghostryder21
btw- HI im totally new here so hi

Welcome to ATS...

Sorry for the one-liner.

Originally posted by ghostryder21
Personally speaking the only online web games I play are mahjong and probably some stunt dirt bike game. As for mmo I am a WoW addict so is my wife and my son plays as well. What type of relevant info can be gathered from playing WoW 6 hours a day? Just basically that I kill cow people trolls and orcs, and that I mine fish and am a blacksmith?? I honestly don’t know but heck I’m not going to stop playing WoW because of this and if the want to target advertisements for a mahjong set or dirt bike my way…well poo.

btw- HI im totally new here so hi

Welcome to ATS! And say goodbye to World of Warcraft. You'll soon be much too addicted to this damn cracksite to be able to maintain any sort of MMORPG presence. joking. but seriously, to most gamers it won't have a direct impact, other than in-game advertising. But, I'm just saying that the potenial is there if these types of intrusions are left unchecked and unchallenged.

Well speaking of advertisers, there are some mmos (forgot which ones) that actually have characters by fast food industries like papa johns or dominoes where you can actually order food in game and have it delivered to your house all without the inconvenience of unplugging from the game and talking to a human. That is until they get to the door and then you have to give your kid the money for the pizza guy and he mistakenly gives him a $10 tip instead of the usual $3

I heard about this a few weeks ago and ever since i've used www.scroogle.org
Its a great way to search google without all the cookies etc