Google’s interest-based advertising aim for higher relevance through processing people’s Internet browsing history. A profile of your Internet habits will be created, noting your browser and the sort of sites you frequent. This additional information will help Google place your profile within certain categories of interest, pitching you ads corresponding to a broader scope of your online activities.

News like this inevitably raise questions about user privacy; a move such as this having long been speculated with dystopian undertones. “This is the Internet’s largest search company now profiling and tracking Internet users. That shouldn’t happen,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Google, with its ventures into an array of social Internet applications, has the resources to build an extremely detailed profile of any user. And Google doesn’t delete, Google doesn’t forget; the information that is collected about you exists virtually forever, as elaborated in this week’s essay Do No Evil—The Dangers of Google.

Google recognizes these concerns and has taken measure to demonstrate the control imposed by its users. At this stage, you are free to edit the categories of interest in your profile, or alternatively delete it altogether. You can also learn how particular ads get pitched to you, through Google’s commitment of transparency in this new endeavor of theirs. Regardless of these efforts, Rotenberg and his organization still express concern for Internet privacy, considering possibilities for responding to Google’s new ad program. He is joined in his concern on Internet privacy by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web. “Surfers on the Internet are at increasing risk from governments and corporations tracking the sites they visit to build up a picture of their activities,” Berners-Lee says; “I think [snooping] is really important to avoid.”