Google has quietly dropped the longstanding wall between anonymous tracking of online ads and user's names, according to a report published by ProPublica.
What is literally the last privacy line in the sand was erased by Google during the US summer.
After it bought the Double Click advertising network in 2007, Google promised that privacy would be its top priority when it thought up new advertising products.
That promise was kept until recently, with DoubleClick's huge database of web browsing data being kept separate by default from names and other personally identifiable information that Google collects from Gmail and its other products.
{loadposition sam08}Google's privacy policy earlier said that it would keep the two types of data separate. This was changed to say that data on browsing habits may be combined with the data from Gmail and other products.
The relevant part of the Google privacy policy. The portion in pink is the old policy.
Existing users have been prompted to opt in to the new regime, with the nondescript title of the invitation being "some new features for your Google account"; for new users, the expanded snooping regime becomes the default.
According to the ProPublica report, "The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the Web may now be customised to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you.
"It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct."