How To Opt Out Of Google's Plan To Sell Your Endorsements To Advertisers

Google announced Friday that it is "pulling a Facebook." Google is making a change to its terms of service that will allow it to monetize the reviews, comments and "+1"s its users have doled out around the Web. Advertisers will be able to incorporate those personalized touches into ads. So if, for example, a contact of mine were searching for "cave hotels in Cappadocia, Turkey," the hotel that I stayed at -- and +1ed afterwards -- could pay to have me appear in a Google ad endorsing the place.

That would be an innocuous use. A worse case scenario is the guy who kiddingly writes a Google+ post about a vat of sex lube and then winds up endorsing it in ads -- as has happened on Facebook with Sponsored Stories. Like Facebook , with Sponsored Stories -- which also uses people's names and photos to promote products users have interacted with on the site -- Google does the usual privacy yada-yada: doesn't apply to users under the age of 18; the ads will respect your existing privacy settings and only be shown to the people who could already see those reviews, +1s, and comments; won't unearth reviews you've sent privately via Gmail (ala Buzz), etc. What makes Google different from Facebook is that it's really easy to opt out if you don't like the sounds of this.

You go to this page, and you make sure this box is unchecked:

According to the New York Times, Google's not actually ready to put this into use yet, but it "wants the ability to create such an ad unit in the future and is notifying users in advance."

Contrast the opt out process with Google competitor Facebook, and it will seem pretty impressive. While Facebook lets you opt out of "social ads" which are similar to what Google is doing, it does not have a one-stop setting for opting out of Sponsored Stories. Atlantic Wire has a good explainer on the difference between them here. Even after being sued over Sponsored Stories and paying out $20 million in a class-action settlement, Facebook privacy director Erin Egan told me, "Nothing has changed in terms of how the Sponsored Stories product works. We added language [to our data use policy] that was required by the settlement – adding an example of what we mean. It's expanding the language, not changing the terms. Controls are the same today as they were before."

Those controls consist of selecting the privacy settings for each individual thing you do on the site -- comments, likes, etc. -- that could potentially be sold for a Sponsored ad. If anyone but you can see it, it could be repackaged as an ad and sold to those people who can see it as a Sponsored Story.