While Australia spends all its time working out new ways to censor people, apparently it does not think much of Google's method of following people online. Google has just started “retargeting” which is a fairly old technnique which involves taking information about user habits using it to pile more adverts on them.

It has been around for a while and Google is fairly late to the party. However last month Google announced that advertisers would be able to track people who had visited their websites and then serve them up relevant display, text or video ads as they move around the internet. Within days of the announcement the big-four Australian media companies that dominate the internet independently refused to allow Google to run its ad-serving technology on their sites. Fairfax Media, News Limited, Yahoo7! and Ninemsn all said that they would block the cookies which Google uses to track internet users as they move around the web.

Perhaps for this reason the technology is being tested in the US and Europe but not in Australia. While the system might be ok for smaller advertising agencies, with Google doing it there is more of a problem The fear is that Google has access to huge amounts of data on us already courtesy of our search habits. If you link all this together you can get a picture of what our lives are really like and what is going on in our noggens. Google would then know what items we search for, what we are reading and increasingly viewing on the web, what subjects we are emailing friends and contacts about and what we are interested in.

Google says that advertisers participating in retargeting programs will own the data attached to the cookies, and it ''cannot'' sell the list of potential targets to other advertisers. Newspaper publishers fear that Google will build up its database and go directly to advertisers and cut them out of the picture.