Everyone who does or ever has used any Google Services, will now be used on Online Ads on the Google Advertising network. This means your name and photo will be used in the online ads you see almost all over the internet.
As per the new terms of services, soon the company will feature users’ names and photos in ads across the web. These will be endorsed as “Shared endorsements“, will leverage any review, comment, +1s, follows or stats from any Google profile from their database.
This clearly means all your activity is monitored by Google and used by them for their business advantage. By using Google services you technically are allowing Google to use any relevant data from your profile/account/activity to be used in an advertisement which would look personalised to the visitor.
The only thing you can control is, setting your profile and shared comments to be shown to your friends so that any data from your profile ever used would only be shown as personalised within your friend circle.
But here is the good news. You can choose to opt-out, and any user under the age of 18 is excluded too. Make sure you even opt-out of +1s so that you are automatically exempted.
These ‘shared endorsements‘ would go live on November 11th 2013, so make sure you are completely aware of them and do the necessary changes if you want to before you see yourself in a Google Ad, smiling and promoting a product you never signed up for.
Source : Google