Google provides more choice over the ads in My Ad Center

Google’s on a privacy bender at its Google I/O developer conference, highlighting how it’s working to keep your data private. Of course, this affects ads, which aren’t just Google’s bread and butter, but the mechanism that keeps most of the internet running. Personalized ads have always felt a little skeevy, but Google’s rolling out a tool later this year called My Ad Center that will let you fine-tune the sorts of ads you don’t want to see and opt-in if there are specific subjects you do want to see more ads for.

My Ad Center will control ads on Google properties like Search and YouTube. For some reason, Google thinks people will be excited to opt-in on specific ad subjects, but the increased user control will almost certainly be appreciated, not just for the privacy-minded but for anyone that’s gotten an ad they don’t like for one reason or another. Every once in a while, an advertisement on one site or another can seem almost offensive in how little it seems to understand about what you want to see, and this should help reduce that.

According to Google, My Ad Center will let you directly control the data used to personalize your ads — they’ll still be targeted to you (presumably, through Google’s upcoming changes with “Topics” to replace cookies), but you can whittle the list down to be a little more applicable.

Based on what we’ve seen, ad types will be organized into certain topical categories, and you can opt to see more or less of a given category based on your interest. So if you search for sports for work but aren’t actually a sports fan, maybe you don’t want to see ads about basketball — that sort of thing seems possible. There’s a whole section in My Ad Center that appears to pertain to privacy, and ad personalization looks like it can be disabled entirely.