In early March 2009, Google notified users of its new AdSense option, “interest-based advertising”. With this announcement, Google also stated that “your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising”.
What’s behind this announcement, what is “interest-based” advertising, and what modifications may be required for your privacy policy if you use this advertising option?
Contextual Advertising; Behavioral Advertising
In its beginning, Google AdSense pioneered in the field of contextual advertising. In simple terms, the goal of Google AdSense with contextual ads was to match the context of a website with relevant ads from the Google inventory of advertisers and to serve these ads to the site. Relevance was determined by the context of the site. So, for example a sports-related site would attract relevant ads for sporting goods.