Probing the Dark Side of Google's Ad-Targeting System

By: Tom Simonite

Narrated by: Todd Mundt

That Google and other companies track our movements around the Web to target us with ads is well known. How exactly that information gets used is not—but a research paper presented last week suggests that some of the algorithmic judgments that emerge from Google's ad system could strike many people as unsavory. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute built a tool called AdFisher to probe the targeting of ads served up by Google on third-party websites. They found that fake Web users believed by Google to be male job seekers were much more likely than equivalent female job seekers to be shown a pair of ads for high-paying executive jobs when they later visited a news website.©Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)Massachusetts Institute of Technology