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Thursday, Mar 21, 2013 9:18 PM UTC

Louie Gohmert unable to understand Google ads

The Texas congressman was left a bit confused during a hearing on EPCA VIDEO

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Topics: Video, Louie Gohmert, Google, Internet, ecpa, House Republicans,

Louie Gohmert unable to understand Google ads (Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In a House hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, revealed that he has apparently been misinformed about how Gmail figures out which ads to display in your account, and no amount of explanation from the Google team could persuade him otherwise.

As Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing explains: ”For the record, here’s how it works: Google parses the email for keywords, checks to see if anyone has bid to have text-ads displayed on emails with those words, and displays ads that match. Here’s how Gohmert thinks they work: A computer at Google reads your email, sends your identity to an advertiser, and asks it if it wants to display ads on your email.”

Gohmert questioned the Google lawyer present at the hearing, and it did not go very well. Here’s a sample from the exchange:

Gohmert: Okay, so what would prevent the federal government from making a deal with Google, so they could also “Scroogle” people, and say “I want to know everyone who has ever used the term ‘Benghazi’” or “I want everyone who’s ever used… a certain term.” Would you discriminate against the government, or would you allow the government to know about all emails that included those words?

Lawyer: Uh… sir, I think those are apples and oranges. I think the disclosure of the identity…

Gohmert: I’m not asking for a fruit comparison. I’m just asking would you be willing to make that deal with the government? The same one you do with private advertisers, so that the government would know which emails are using which words.

Lawyer: Thank you, sir. I meant by that, that it isn’t the same deal that’s being suggested there.

Gohmert: But I’m asking specifically if the same type of deal could be made by the federal government?…But if that same government will spend tens of thousands to do a commercial, they might, under some hare-brained idea like to do a deal to get all the email addresses that use certain words. Couldn’t they make that same kind of deal that private advertisers do?

Watch:

You can also read the full transcript at TechDirt.

Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com. More Jillian Rayfield.

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