The Wall Street Journal got its hands on a financial report filed by Google in December last year. The Internet company, which is also the most valuable brand this year, intends to deliver ads on almost any IP-enabled device that it has access to in the future.
“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” Google said recently. “We expect the definition of mobile to continue to evolve as more and more ‘smart’ devices gain traction in the market.”
“For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities,” the company said.
The company says that their ads are becoming more device-agnostic. Now, I really don’t know how many of us would really want to see ads on our refrigerators and car dashboards. Instead of having different ad platforms for different devices, the company wants to serve the same ads through any possible device such that it reaches the right user at the right time irrespective of the device they are using.
Are you getting worried? Well, why shouldn’t you? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and other groups have also raised concerns about the potential for privacy intrusions in a world where many things that people use on a daily basis are connected to the Internet.
The Positive
Keeping the concerns aside, let’s try and think how can it be beneficial. Well, next time you walk into a grocery store, your refrigerator might message your mobile phone that you’re out of milk. Wouldn’t that be something? Of course, this new technology comes with a lot of concerns, the biggest one being privacy and misuse of customer data.
Considering Google knows how to serve ads properly, you’ll at least see ads that are relevant to you. The more information you share, the better it will get. Moreover, of all the companies, Google is one that has always been open about what they do with user data. Hopefully, the ads will continue to be unobtrusive like the ones on Google Search. Also, this will take quite a lot of time to hit the shelves, especially in India. Till then we can stop worrying about ads and think of the wonders it can do!