Google Thinks I’m a Middle-Aged Man. What About You?

I'm a woman who is too young to remember the Reagan administration, but Google has me pegged as a middle-aged man.

Given my habit of browsing technology websites, the search engine probably placed me in my father's demographic a long time ago. But it didn't break the news to me until Tuesday, when it rolled out a revamped privacy policy that drew my attention to my account.

That's when I noticed a settings tab in my Google account called Ads Preferences, launched a few months ago, that shows the basic profile Google has compiled based upon my web browsing habits. Other websites who partner with Google use the profile to target ads on their sites.

Here is a snapshot of what Google thinks I'm interested in:

Look like a 35- to 44-year-old dude to you? Google, too. Google uses a cookie, that is, a long string of alphanumeric characters, to convey this snapshot along with its guess for my age and gender to other websites.

If Google were to have attached a non-PR-filtered, honest note to this page (it didn't), I imagine it would say something link this:

"See, this is all we're concerned about in this whole tracking business. It's not even detailed enough information to distinguish a middle-aged man from a girl technology reporter. To us, your profile is just a series of random digits, nothing more. And if you don't like it, we are making it so easy to opt out that you have no excuse not to."

Easy it may be, but there's still a battle raging between privacy advocates on one side and Google and advertising agencies on the other over whether an opt-out solution to privacy in behavioral advertising, like the one Google participates in, is sufficient.

User data has become the number one factor that advertisers take into account when searching for a media partner, and the Network Advertising Initiative released a study that found behaviorally targeted advertising secured more than 2.5 times as much revenue per ad as its non-targeted counterpart. Both parties are hoping to prove that a choice to opt out of behavioral tracking is sufficient privacy protection.

Privacy advocates, meanwhile, have demanded an opt-in solution that would only allow behavioral tracking if a user consented to it, citing, for instance, a 2010 study in which only 51% of participants realized that online behavioral advertising "happened a lot."

"People understand that the [grocery store] is obviously keeping track of the food that they buy, but they're getting it cheaper," John Simpson, a privacy advocate with the non-profit Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, told me about a year ago while explaining why he opposed an opt-out solution. "And if they're using those cards, they're willing to give up some of their information for cheaper prices. The thing about what's going on online is nobody really understood what they were giving up."

Google looks to be making a bigger effort to help people understand how they are being tracked. And after looking at my own profile, what it's telling other sites about me doesn't make me paranoid. The step is probably not a big enough effort for most privacy advocates — some people don't know how to find the opt-out button on the settings page and it's easy to imagine the havoc Google could wreak with information it is capable of collecting — but is it enough for you?

Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy