Thank you for the invitation to participate today.
My name's Nicole Wong.
I'm the deputy general counsel for Google and one of my
responsibilities is privacy at our company.
I'm going to cover today our approach to privacy generally,
as well the types of data we collect for purposes of
serving relevant advertising to our users.
At Google, we spend a lot of time studying our own business
because the entire industry is changing so rapidly.
In the online advertising world, we found two
things to be true.
First, advertising is a critical
component of the web ecosystem.
When we do our job well, we connect consumers with
information they want at the time they want it.
Online advertisers and publishers, including small
businesses and bloggers are flourishing because of the
ability to reach their consumers in an effective and
efficient way.
And billions of dollars of services and information are
provided today for free--
or nearly free--
because of online advertising.
The second thing we found to be true is that our users'
trust and their privacy are critical to our business.
Because we support open platforms, as Tim Armstrong
was describing to you this morning, our users are free to
pick up and leave. And because of that we have to work every
day on every product to earn their
trust and their business.
In advertising, we've created a very robust ad platform
without having to use much information about a user it
all in order to effectively target the ads.
And I'll describe those systems in more detail.
Our business depends on getting this balance right.
And we're committed to continuing to provide the
benefits of online advertising in a way that
protects user privacy.
Let me spend just one minute talking about our team.
I am enormously fortunate to work at a company where
privacy isn't just the lawyer's problem, instead it's
a value that's affirmed throughout the company, from
our engineers through our executives.
And for that reason, our approach to privacy is not to
solve a privacy problem by having a
well-worded privacy policy.
Although, I'll tell you that we spend a lot of time on
those policies, and on things like our recently released
videos about what a log file is or what a cookie is.
And I hope you will check out our new Google privacy channel
on YouTube.
But in addition to that, we work really hard at designing
privacy protections into the product itself.
The team that drives the process looks like this--
with a lot of experienced leadership at the top, and
importantly, attorneys who are embedded with the products to
make sure that the products are designed
with privacy in mind.
We also have, of course, support teams and security
teams who are experts at what they do.
So let me turn to our advertising offerings.
They are basically two.
We try to connect with consumers when they search,
known as our AdWords product, and consumers when they visit
websites, where we also display ads, or
in our AdSense product.
This is a simplification, but it's necessary given the time
constraints.
Both of these offerings are contextual advertising.
So they get results based mostly on the current context
of the user, not on the user's past behavior or profile.
So first, to look at AdWords.
We're connecting with consumers when they search.
And a Google AdWords advertiser will purchase text
ads, which you can see up here, the mutual funds ad,
that are provided in response to a search query that's
entered into our search engine.
So the advertiser will design that text ad, choose a keyword
that triggers the ad-- in this case it's mutual funds.
The advertiser picks a language and the geography it
wants to target.
And then the advertiser decides how much it wants to
pay when the user clicks on that ad.
With this inventory of ads, Google will then match the ad
to the chosen keyword.
We check for the language preference of the user.
We check for the IP address in order to get the geolocation,
and then we algorithmically rank the ads for relevancy to
the users based on the quality score that has to do it
whether the landing page is of quality, whether there's a lot
of clickthrough rate on that ad.
And then finally, we run the auction.
The advertiser then pays when a user clicks on their ad.
Importantly, we are targeting here based on the user's
search term, not on a profile.
So in our experience, ads are more useful, and thus, more
effective, when we can correctly identify what the
user is looking for in that moment.
This is in contrast to behavioral targeting that's
based on a profile built on past activity in order to
target an ad.
Our AdSense service works very much the same, except instead
of using keywords to target we use the content of the page.
So this is a page by Seat Guru which is used to tell you what
the best seats on the airplane are.
And we take terms based on that in order to target the
ads, much in the way that key words use.
Again, importantly here, we're matching on very limited
information, and to be really specific
about what we collect.
When a user comes to our site, they never have to register to
use Google.
You can go up to any internet kiosk, any computer and type
in a search without registering with us.
And at that time, the only thing we collect is standard
log information--
URL, IP address, basic information about your
computer and a cookie ID.
The same is true when you view an ad on one of our AdSense
network partners--
IP address, URL, time and date, and the ad viewed.
By the way, descriptions of the types of stuff that's in a
log file is actually in our privacy policy, and also in a
recently released video that describes what it is.
So let me finally end with how we protect user privacy.
As I was saying, we deliver timely, relevant ads with very
little user information, instead we
use contextual targeting.
We were also the first major search engines to announce a
finite logs policy of 18 months, after which we
anonymize the IP addresses and cookies.
And our cookies expire after two years.
We limit the disclosure of data.
We don't transfer P2 data to advertisers.
We have a team that's dedicated to reviewing all
requests for user information from the government or any
other third party.
And we have strong expert teams for network security,
software engineering, physical security, to protect all of
these systems.
Leaving you with a final word--
this is a very important discussion for us to be having
across the industry.
This is a very complex business, with many
stakeholders.
And the third thing we found to be true is that the online
advertising industry is evolving.
So it's appropriate for us to be reviewing our practices in
light of those changes, with an eye to the continued health
of the web ecosystem and to the trust and
privacy of our users.
Thank you very much.