However, Google has started, or will start soon, a program whereby they track your activities on the web, and then use that information to serve ads that might be of interest to you based on those activities. That's the plain English version of what they're doing. Here's the legalese:
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We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.
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And here's the information Google asked me to make sure you get:
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1 - Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site.
2 - Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to this site and other sites on the Internet.
3 - Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy. (There's an opt-out link at the bottom of this page, by the way.)
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Hokay. Now, the advantage of this type of thing is that when you visit my site, you'll get ads that are more likely to be worth looking at. The disadvantage, obviously, is that Google is tracking your activities on the web.
So should you be concerned? Well, I'm not, at least for the time being. Google has a track record of safeguarding information, even when that caused them hassles. And I'm not expecting that to change any time soon. So, I'm not going to opt out. But you can, by going to this page: