Google patent profiles gamers, can build psychological profile

Filed in archive Announcements on May 21, 2007

says Google: it's not creepy if we have your best interests at heart

Today, let's look a little over the horizon at something that would very likely mutate into the digital television space: using algorithms to evaluate people's psychology. You may be saying to yourself that you won't ever let this happen but don't fool yourself. Nate Anderson at Ars Technica wrote a good piece on this, delving into a patent Google filed back in 2005 but became public several weeks ago.

"The inventor is listed as Shumeet Baluja, a staff research scientist at Google whose work has been profiled before on Ars when another patent surfaced that explained how to use a laptop's microphone to monitor television shows. In the current patent, the monitoring approach is extended to video games, where information about a person's interests and gaming behavior may be determined by monitoring their online gaming activities (and perhaps making inferences from such activities)."

Wow, gamers just have to love having their personalities being profiled by the way they play games and chat with other players. But it is Google that wants to do that, so it must be OK since they have that cutesy little motto about doing no evil. If it were the government, or Microsoft, or McDonalds, or the Christian Coalition that would be totally different beast.

For example, the dialog could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.

The Google patent also points out that the ads in question can be more than just pictures on a billboard and gives the example of using a "sponsored" narrative voice. Here, from the patent, is an actual, I-kid-you-not example of how this might work: "As another example in a car racing game, after a user crashes his Honda civic [sic], an announcer could be used to advertise by saying for instance 'if he had a Hummer, he would have gotten the better of that altercation.'" Doesn't that sound awesome?

When Google comes out with their Internet television service someday and marries it with Google Video and YouTube, I wonder what other great spyware things features they have in mind.