Google will harm your business

& why users’ privacy is important

TLDR; Your interactions with your customers are signals which might already been monetized by Google..

It’s not a big secrete that Google harvest personal data for their ads sales. And it’s also not a big secrete that your business may already benefit from this practice. For example, early this year, after I googled some popular car models, car sales ads started appearing when I watch youtube videos. So, what’s problem? Well, let me explain.

Say you have a business and send regular news letters to your customers (or potential customers). It’s a common sense that receivers only open and read it when they are likely to make decisions. You may already setup the tracking system on the “open” events, and have your sales reps working on these signals. So does Google. Google probably already have their eyes on this kind of signals, and already reverse engineered your emails sent to customers so that they can place corresponding ads on Youtube, Blog, Search pages, Google News, GDocs, etc.

Google will defend themselves with the almighty word “choice”. What’s wrong with presenting people more choices? Well, my argument is it costs money and time to build a relationship with a customer, and as business owners, we are entitled to the ownership of the purchase window without being hijacked.

Is google already doing this? I have not evidence but a)they understood signals years ago, b) it’s not a big engineering challenge, and c) most importantly, no monopoly power doesn’t abuse its advantages following the rule of power corrupts.