The Most Evil Tech Company

[Asher]

No, you don't understand this at all. Simple facts you're way off on here.

No, you're just hysterical and paranoid and unreasonable.

You've fallen for it hook line and sinker...

I've fallen for absolutely nothing. I don't give a rats ass about this either way. Why? Because it doesn't matter.

I don't give a **** if some kid is WiFi snooping when I search for anything on Google. I also don't give a **** if some advertising company has to make do with not getting free information from Google about its customers.

This is wholly a "don't give a ****" situation for 99.99% of people. And it's not because they don't understand it. It's because they're not crazy.

Case closed.

Also, your argument basically boils down to: "Won't somebody pleeeeease think of those poor advertisers??!! This makes their life so much harder!!". You may wish to consider a different tactic.

[Asher]

If it's such an acceptable practice, why all the misdirection and lies?

Considering what they are doing was plainly stated in such a way that made everyone who could possibly care about it aware of the changes, I have a hard time seeing how they're misdirecting or lying. All of their statements on the matter clearly indicate Adwords customers would continue to receive information as before in a more limited way (top 1000 search phrases only), while others would not. Sane people aren't upset about this for a variety of reasons:
1) **** advertisers.
2) It's Google's search engine, why should it provide its information gained from using the service they spend billions to develop publicly to its competitors?
3) **** advertisers.
4) Arguably, they shouldn't have been providing the information they did publicly to begin with.
5) **** advertisers.

[Aeson]

They must not have stated things very clearly, because you still don't understand the basic facts of the matter. Adwords has it's own reporting separate from Webmaster Tools. Adwords will still report every keyword viewed to the advertiser, passing the same information as Google is claiming needs to not be passed to protect "privacy". They have to. It's how the whole system is designed. Adsense will still have access to all that data too, though they don't seem to have a method yet to share that data. Analytics is the one that's having it's reporting gutted. For everything but the keyword, this can be replicated by other services. It's the keyword that matters most for targeted advertising though.

Furthermore, to get this "privacy protection" you will have to log into Google so that you are actually passing more data to Google (and Adsense/advertisers). That's the lie you don't seem to understand. This is very much like the Patriot Act. A red herring so that they can scare people into giving up even more of their protections. Now, I don't really care about the privacy at all... but it is a huge lie on their part to claim this is protecting people's privacy. All it's about is giving them an uneven playing field in the advertising space. Yet rather than come out and say that's what they're doing, they've constructed this red herring to try to scare people with lies into helping them make it even more uneven.

Webmaster Tools reporting is what they are referring to with the 1000 search phrases.

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As for the advertisers, your depiction of my argument doesn't make any sense at all. This is good for some advertisers and bad for other advertisers. For me it's largely meaningless since I already solely use Adsense and have enough keyword data already saved up to work for years on. There won't be any change in my ability to serve targeted ads on my sites.

While you, and most people, may not like advertisers... without targeted advertising there's going to be a lot less value on the web. Knowing the keyword someone is coming in on can be worth quite a bit. In my experience that data about doubles eCPM. It will require more ad blocks to get back to the same eCPM, and probably still fall short. That means less money for webmasters, which means less content or less valuable content creation. A large number of quality websites are supported by ad revenue. Without the advertisers those websites either wouldn't exist, or at least not be able to provide as much value as they do. Google is threatening the overall value of the web here, hoping for a larger % of the smaller resulting pie.

[Archbob]

Apple is far more monopolistic in their actions than Google or Microsoft, but they don't own enough market share to ever be declared a monopoly.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

tech companies are babies

the real evil is in

#1 Military Industry
#2 Pharma
#3 Energy

the rest lags faaaar behind and tech companies are probably most positive of them all... all foxconn employees would need to commit mass suicide in a single day in order to make a dent in the amount of pain that the top three industries listed above cause on a daily basis in pursue of profits...