Google documents filed in antitrust case show efforts to push data collection limits

For almost as long as it has existed, Google has been at the center of controversies around its data strategy, ranging from privacy concerns, data retention with its related cybersecurity implications, and compliance, to the debate about what kind of limits there should be for leveraging data.

A series of Google internal documents, which were entered as exhibits in an ongoing United States prosecution of the company on antitrust issues, shines a light on the data giant’s strategy and positioning. The documents are roughly seven years old, so these memos may not reflect Google’s current thinking, but they do give IT leaders a peek into Google’s candid views on data strategies.

The Google documents are part of the United States Vs. Google litigation being heard in the US District Court for Virginia’s Eastern District, and were made public August 6.

The internal documents made clear Google’s enthusiasm for coordinating all possible data about users so that they could sell the most focused details to advertisers. Google said that it needs to “use a combination of advertiser data such as email subscription lists, Google signed-in data such as web traversal data, Gmail data such as receipts, and subscribed newsletters, to target users across multiple devices.” 

It also showed a fondness for various corporate-speak euphemisms for spying on users, such as “sharing of conversational corpus” and “being able to harvest the conversation signals that could improve ad timeliness and applicability will be important to stay competitive.” 

Google said that it needed to invest more heavily “to improve our understanding of the message that is being exchanged between the parties. To be used to better understand the funnel position of a user and as well as broad quality uplift.”

Google also wrote that it needed to “evaluate tradeoffs between user happiness and shorter-term revenue gains.”

The notes also revealed hesitation by some at Google to push data usage too far, saying, “The capabilities of Gmail ads format has remained a quite limited set over the last couple of years, mostly due to security concerns by the consumer Gmail team.”

One document did express corporate worries about privacy, but it was not involving the privacy of users. It involved the privacy of Google itself. 

“Once again, the privacy protections here are key. We would never allow audiences generated with Google data to leave the Google ecosystem, nor impression level reports based on those media buys,” it said. “Ad tech vendors or agencies could then use these reports and the ability to activate media from them within their own systems. We suggest we require Google-branded, or alternatively white-labeled or otherwise branded by the partner.”

The documents also show that Google at the time was starting to see the need to focus more on what users were doing online and less on where they were doing it. Google said that it wanted to focus on “geo-targeting based on weather/travel searches, not IP address, auto make/model/year, e-commerce product catalogs, user profile/ transaction data, etc.”

Google strategists elaborated on these possibilities as they evaluated efforts by various companies that were luring away Google advertisers. 

“Services have enough data — typically location, logged-in users, intent data — to offer unique targeting aligned with their brand. Weather.com can command a premium with weather data, Pandora can optimize based on what type of music someone listens to, etc. TripAdvisor can target based on destination searches. Commerce companies can even expand into audience extension, buying third-party inventory on behalf of advertisers. We lost Wayfair because AppNexus is better at this than us,” the documents said.

“Audio services like Pandora and Spotify are heavily subscription-driven and many content companies are pursuing subscriptions with increasing success. NYT [New York Times] makes as much from subscriptions as ads and wants to emulate Netflix’s sophistication with upsells. Conde Nast is trying to build a universal subscriber ID to manage on-site subscription offers.”

The documents also included management discussions about Google’s strategic weaknesses, pointing out that some advertisers who had left Google fared significantly better.

“Weather.com ended exclusivity with Google and is seeing 30%+ revenue lift,” it said.

The documents also looked at Gmail’s global challenges at the time, under “coverage shortcomings,” noting:

“Gmail lacking strong penetration in Apple devices. No obvious differentiator from Apple Mail to merit standalone download, unlike data differentiator in Maps. Gmail lacking footprint in key countries/regions. China: no Google products. Japan: Yahoo mail is the leading provider. Russia: Mail.ru is the key player.”

The Virginia case, one of multiple antitrust actions involving Google at the moment, is heading to a jury trial. Many more documents, some of them much more recent, are expected to be published soon. Those are likely to shed even more light on Google’s data strategies.