Google, the company that wants to answer the question “what should I do tomorrow?” wants us to know it has a conscience. Rest assured: when they tell us what we want to do, they won’t use it against us.

To coincide with the Federal Trade Commission’s two-day town hall meeting on behavioral advertising, Google has created a YouTube channel explaining their privacy policies. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see them embracing openness but it makes for some of the driest content imaginable.

Above: Maile Ohye Walks Us Through Personalized Search

The potential for misuse of information will grow as user data becomes ubiquitous across all mediums. As we trend toward an entirely digitally interconnected world, everything we do will be registered somewhere.

Google continues to insert themselves into layers between the user and the internet, apparently seeking to be the clearinghouse for all this data; ensuring that when the internet is everywhere, Google will be following the users, wherever they are.

Yahoo has announced its acquisition of behavioral targeting ad network BlueLithium for $300 million.

From BlueLithium’s site:

The acquisition of BlueLithium enables Yahoo! to accelerate its advertising, product, and engineering roadmaps, and gives the company increased capabilities to sell and measure performance-based campaigns both on and off the Yahoo! network.

BlueLithium and Yahoo! share a common goal of providing both advertisers and publishers with high quality inventory and the essential targeting and analytical tools that are necessary to reach the right consumers at the right times. The addition of BlueLithium is the logical next step in creating the largest and most effective online ad network globally, which also includes inventory on Yahoo!’s owned and operated properties, the Yahoo! Publisher Network, and the Right Media Exchange. We believe that together Yahoo! and BlueLithium will help drive the next evolution of the online advertising industry.

The competitive landscape for premium advertising products and services continues to be the hotspot of the industry, at least as far as dollars are concerned. Yahoo’s purchase of BlueLithium directly mirrors AOL’s pickup of Tacoda for $275mil. Although they seem like paltry sums when compared to the $6 billion paid for aQuantive or the $2billion for DoubleClick, it continues to shine the spotlight on increasing the eCPMs of online advertising inventory. Whether the premium prices on behavioral targeting eventually back into solid ROI remains to be seen, but it seems that AOL and Yahoo are both willing to bet they can increase the value of the remnant inventory they have available.

The good folks at Bear Stearns obviously agree with the move. Despite the massive shake-ups of late at Yahoo, and arguable lack of cohesive strategy, Bear Stearns named Yahoo its top pick for the next 12-16 months.

In-page and in-banner video advertising doesn’t add any challenges to behavioral targeting on the ad serving front, however leveraging the content of streamed video to determine a user’s behavior is still anyone’s game. Yahoo’s ownership of social bookmarking service del.icio.us certainly makes for an interesting partner with a powerful behavioral targeting technology. Just how far the public is willing to let any one company leverage their collective services for the sake of serving more relevant advertising, search results and content also remains to be seen. The final verdict on DoubleClick’s use of Google’s search data may provide some insight.

Via BoingBoing and PR Differently - The car and 11-camera mount that Immersive Media uses to create those street level maps. If you see one in your city…shield your face from big brother!

Immersive also has a cool demo on their site of how the setup works.

Google apparently shot their own higher quality street level maps in San Francisco - probably using this:

Image courtesy: Ben Syverson

And if you’re not convinced that these get pretty close and personal check out these images via Streetviewr.

Screen captures courtesy: Google Blogoscoped. Click above to view on Google’s site.