Google, China, Data Collection, Privacy and Online Marketing

Google's revelation of a possible China-based phishing attach on Gmail users has become big news--even leading off the BBC telecasts.  In its post on the incident, Google frames the issue as "ensuring your information safe online."  But missing from its discussion is its on work to harvest and mine user data in China--and other regions nearby.  So much consumer information is being scooped up by Google and other online giants in the lucrative China and APAC market that it should be part of this story.  For example,  Google Research in China is the "largest R&D center in Asia," that works on "advertising technologies impacting many parts of China."  Among the Center's projects is work on "Large scale structured data mining," including the development of "parallelized key subroutines for mining massive data sets."  It is also involved in efforts to "leverage the massive data and search technologies" for its e-commerce businesses, including the development of "next-generation mobile killer apps" [think location data].

Google recently explained how its expanding its "rich media" advertising in China and other Asia-Pacific markets: 
"It’s pretty simple – we intend to provide advertisers, agencies and publishers with engaging rich media advertising formats, including HTML5 and IAB rising star formats like side swipe, which are built and delivered on Google’s secure and stable platform. We believe that this, in combination with partnerships across APAC from India to Australia, China and Japan, will help drive rich media adoption in APAC."  It's Admob mobile marketing division has a focus on China.  Finally, Google enables a list of data partners to use its network for ad targeting in the APAC market [see partial list below].

As the press and policymakers discuss privacy and security, they should also address the implications of the data collection for user targeting system companies like Google (and others) have established--including in countries where policies don't support democracy.

Vendors list (Asia Pacific)