Berkman Luncheon Series >

dec
23
2008

Watching Google AdWords: The Mysterious Mechanization of Meaning in the Google Brain

Hal Roberts

Tuesday, December 23, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.

Google's AdWords system serves ads alongside about a quarter of all web traffic. In the process of serving those ads, Google actively processes the user browsing data in order to target its advertising, making AdWords one of the world's most extensive processors of personal data.  But existing approaches to privacy and surveillance struggle to describe harms from such uses of consumer data that are proportionate to the amount of personal data involved. Google may have access to this vast stream of personal data, but it cannot take away your job, jail you, or kill you using that data, and there are many well documented cases of surveillance, online and offline, that do result in those sorts of outcomes. So why should we care deeply about Google's processing of advertising data online in the face of other, obviously authoritarian uses of surveillance?

We should care because Google's use of the AdWords data seeds a network of grey surveillance that may not have direct effects on the individual surveillance subjects but does have important effects on our modes of creating and consuming content online.  By viewing AdWords as a network of grey surveillance, we can analyze it not as a single source of Big Brother type surveillance, but instead as the hub of a network of surveillance like activities.  Each of these activities may or may not amount to surveillance or have a significant, direct impact on the individual subject, but together they have potentially profound impacts on social discourse (and through that discourse on the individual subjects of surveillance).

In particular, the grey surveillance activities that surround Google's search and ad ranking systems have fostered the growth of a system of collective intelligence (a Google brain) powered by its deep integration into the content consumption of its users.  The AdWords and AdSense terming systems have moved the work of creating meaning for consumer objects away from the advertising itself and toward the attached content.  And that network, driven by ad auction and pay per click payment systems, acts as a deeply opaque mechanized bureaucracy that replaces many of the functions traditionally served by advertising agencies.  The result is a mysterious mechanization of meaning in the Google brain which plays a central role in the creation of social discourse online.

About Hal

Hal Roberts is the long time geek in/out of residence at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. He is currently doing research in the areas of internet filtering circumvention, botnet and other grey forms of surveillance, and analysis of main stream and new/citizen media.  Hal has worked on the technical side of many Berkman projects over the years, including H2O, Weblogs at Harvard Law, and Global Voices Online.

Links

• An Eye on Surveillance Blog
• Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the lunch
  

Click the play button below to start the audio.

Location

Berkman Center for Internet and Society

License

Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported

Copyright Holder

The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Radio Berkman 179: The Googleplex

The story of Google's rise to prominence is one of consistently radical innovation. In the 1990s Google reinvented the model of the search engine — transforming it to an algorithmically-driven ranking system — and online advertising — making it possible for anyone to be an advertiser or advertisement host. Since then Google has taken on and dominated almost every other sector of the web by taking advantage of — and in many ways building — some of the web's greatest assets: speed, openness, and ability to take risks and experiment. That's according to Steven Levy, author of the new book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. But the story of Google is not just one of innovation. It's a coming of age story in which a young, idealistic startup is confronted with the harsh realities of growing into the world's third largest tech company: antitrust investigations, lawsuits, and a particularly tense standoff with the leadership of the largest country in the world. Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired Magazine, and he joins us today to talk about his new best-selling profile of Google.

Produced 18 Apr 2011

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