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>> Miss Wong, you have five minutes, or thereabouts.
>> NICOLE WONG: Thank you. Chairmen Rush and Boucher, ranking members
Radanovich and Stearns, and members of the committee, I'm pleased to appear before you
this evening to discuss online advertising and the ways that Google protects our users'
privacy. Online advertising is critically important
to our economy. It promotes freer, more robust and more diverse
speech. It enables many thousands of small businesses
to connect with consumers across the nation and around the world.
It helps support the hundreds of thousands of blogs, online newspapers and other web
publications that we read every day. Over the last decade, the industry has struggled
with the challenges of providing behavioral advertising.
On the one hand, well-tailored ads benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers alike.
On the other hand, we recognize the need to deliver relevant ads while respecting users'
privacy. In March, Google entered this space and announced
our release of intraspace advertising for our AdSense partner sites and for Youtube.
Intraspace advertising uses information about the web pages people visit to make the online
ads they see more relevant. And relevant advertising has fueled much of
the content, products and services available on the internet today.
As Google prepared to roll out intraspace advertising, we talked to many users, privacy
and consumer advocates and government experts. Those conversations led us to realize that
we needed to solve three important issues in order to provide consumers with greater
transparency and choice, which are core design principles at Google.
First, who served the ad? Second, what information is being collected,
and how is it being used? And finally, how can consumers be given more
control over how their information is used? This evening, I'd like to show you how we
answered each of those questions with the launch of intraspace advertising, which includes
innovative, consumer-friendly features to provide meaningful transparency and choice
for our users. When you see an online ad today, you generally
don't know much about that ad. It's difficult to tell who provided the ad
and how your information is being collected and used.
Google is trying to solve this problem by providing a link to more information right
in the ad. As you can see where it's labeled "Ads by
Google." This is very different from current industry
practices, but we believe that it is important to provide users more information about the
ad right at the point of interaction. We believe that this is a significant innovation
that empowers consumers, and we think that this is the direction that many in the industry
are going. If you're curious about getting information
about the ad, you can click on the Google link and navigate to an information page about
Google Ads, which you can see here. On this page, you're invited to visit our
Ads Preference Manager, which helps explain-- in a plain language, user-friendly format--
what information is being collected, how it's being used and how you can exercise choice
and get more information about how this advertising product works.
Here's the Ads Preference Manager. This innovative tool allows you to see what
interests are associated with an advertising cookie, the double-click cookie, that is set
in the browse you're using. In this case, Google has inferred that my
cookie should be associated with hybrid cars, movie rentals and sales, and real estate.
This is because I visited sites, using the browser, about hybrids, movies and real estate.
Before Google introduced the Ads Preference Manager, most users had no idea what interests
were being associated with their cookies online by advertising companies.
We're the first major company to introduce this kind of transparency.
Now you can see those interests, and if you don't agree with those interests-- maybe your
not a movie fan, or you simply don't want to see ads about movies-- you can delete any
one of them, or a few, or as many as you want. So, for example, if you want to delete movie
rentals and sales, you can do that with one click.
I've just done that. Likewise, you can add any interests you like.
Note that Google does not use sensitive categories, so there's nothing in here about *** orientation,
religious affiliation, health status or the like.
But there are many, many other options. For example, if you're a sports fan, you can
associate your cookie with sports. And with a click, I've decided that I'd like
to receive ads personalized for sports fans. If you prefer not to see intraspace ads from
Google, you can opt-out at any time with one click.
After you opt-out, Google won't collect information for intraspace advertising, and you won't
receive intraspace ads from us. You'll still see ads, but they may not be
as relevant. The opt-out is achieved by attaching an opt-out
cookie to your browser. Opt-out cookies in the industry, however,
have traditionally not been persistent, that is they're often inadvertently deleted from
the browser when the user deletes her cookies. So our engineers have developed a tool-- that
was not previously available-- that makes Google's opt-out cookie [no audio], even when
users clear other cookies from their browsers. After you opt-out, just click the "Download"
button and follow the instructions to install a browser plug-in that saves your opt-out
settings even when you clear your cookies. I hope this gives you a better idea how Google
shows intraspace ads, and how we provide users with transparency in the right place, at the
right time, as well as meaningful, granular and user-friendly choices for setting ad preferences
or opting out. Thank you very much for your time.