Online ad-serving tests
Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product
Manager
We're always experimenting and testing ways to deliver relevant
and new kinds of ads, and as part of that, we recently started
running a test of an ad serving technology that will help us
understand online ad serving better, and allow us to experiment
with some new approaches to privacy for third-party ad servers. The
privacy features we'll test in these experiments follow some
recently-announced policies, such as a
id="h-8r" >shorter expiration date for the cookie set on your
computer and
anonymization of the logs data after 18 months.
In our ad-serving tests, we're introducing an
mechanism so people can opt out of the test ad-serving cookie
if they wish. In addition, we’re going to experiment with ways the
industry could provide improved transparency for consumers and
providing users with additional controls over the data gathered by
ad servers. Some of the ideas we're exploring include:
using "crumbled" cookies, so that the data typically
associated with one unique identifying number or "cookie
ID" will be broken up among multiple different cookies and
diffuse the ad history of individual users;
providing better forms of notice within ads, to help users
understand who is serving the ads they see, and what data is being
collected; and
giving users the ability to provide feedback to us about the
ads they like and don't like.
Like all experiments, these ideas may or may not work out. And they
won't be effective unless the industry adopts them — we are
not likely to implement these ideas alone. But we are excited to
start innovating in this area for our advertising customers and for
our users. We welcome your 
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