New Advertising Features on Google and Facebook

Yesterday, Google announced on its official blog that it will use cookies to track your browser in order to generate more relevant ads on your browser:

"By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers."

As well, Facebook announced advanced ad targeting features to target users with language and target location radius:

"Many of you have told us you would like to target users by the primary language they speak. Now you can. For instance if you would like to target Spanish speaking users in the United States, simply type in "spanish" into the targeting box labeled: Languages. "




With the new features, advertisers on Google and Facebook can place more relevant ads on your browser and you will be more interested in clicking them. Obviously, the competition among online advertising industry is very high. They are adding new functions to remain competitive.

However, one thing I am worried is how they do it. For example, Google will track users' activities by storing a cookie on your computer. They promise not to retrieve any sensitive information from your computer. But, can you tell what information they gather from you? Cookie is like a silent stalker watching what you have done on your computer.

The power of technology adds benefits/ values to users (Do we actually care?) and advertisers while the threat of leaking out information increasing.

More about cookie:
Cookies, more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a Web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts. The term "cookie" is derived from "magic cookie," a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies. Some alternatives to cookies exist, but each has its own uses, advantages, and drawbacks.
Cookies are also subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs that run on the browsing computer. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data that affect the operation of a web server, not the client, and do so in very specific ways. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, although cookies from certain sites are described as spyware by many anti-spyware products because they allow users to be tracked when they visit various sites.
Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes some websites unusable. For example, shopping carts implemented using cookies do not work if cookies are rejected.