This is interesting, especially for someone like me who uses Firefox 90% of the time. People won’t mind ads in Firefox if Mozilla is transparent about its implementation. Mozila needs to empower the user to turn these ads on/off. They need to explicitly disclose what data is being collected and shared with advertisers. You can read more about Mozilla’s thoughts on this here.
For now, it’s too early to conclude if they are becoming greedy. Lets wait and watch.
Google recently updated their terms of services which will be implemented starting November 11. You can read more about the changes here. The changes are very interesting(to google ofcourse) and yet disturbing (to users like you and me) given the implications they have on google ads served.
Imagine yourself with your profile pic in a google ad endorsing a restaurant(or any product for that matter) on your friends search for a restuarant, just because you shared a review or a news about that restaurant on your google plus profile. It might make one feel like a celebrity, but what if you won’t recommend that to a close friend at all, but you shared the review as some kind of awareness to your friends on google plus. The fact is these endorsements are complicated and we don’t benefit (imagine yourself getting paid as a model for endorsing something 😉 ) from these in great way. Hope you are getting my point here. I am little apprehensive about these google ads and endorsements and I dont want my profile pic on what google thinks as my recommendation. So i just turned off these endorsements.
If you are in the same boat like me feeling uncomfortable, just head over here and turn the endorsements off. If you would like to keep them on for some reason, just make sure your profile pic looks cool 🙂