Now that I've heard Google's side, I guess this blog WON'T have to move after all

I owe Google an apology. Yes, you can use Google and Gmail and all the other services with a good conscience after all. Google does NOT discriminate against Christianity.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding when it came to its decision to decline certain ads from Concordia Publishing House. I don't know whether CPH administrator Bruce Kintz has revised his initial position, but Google has only refused business from CPH for one particular type of ad- and for a very good reason. Given CPH's publicly expressed attitude toward confidentiality, I suspect that upon reflection it might even agree with Google.

What Google actually refused to do was to accept CPH business for its retargeting ads, which take information from a site you visit and displays ads for those items on subsequent sites you visit. Now, imagine that you are a person in a Muslim country who is considering converting to Christianity and who reads about Luther's Small Catechism on the CPH site. In your country, apostasy from Islam is punishable by imprisonment and even death. It's not hard to see why you would not want ads for the Catechism or other ads for books on Christian catechesis popping up unpredictably on websites you visit on your computer!

Or imagine that you are a woman in an abusive marriage. You consult the CPH website about books on when divorce might be a biblical option. You husband gets home from work- and finds every page he visits riddled with ads about Christians and abusive marriages and divorce.

You can find more information here. But it's Google's policy not to allow retargeting ads which have to do with certain subjects which could result in sensitive information falling into the wrong hands. Targeting ads carry that potential, especially when they have to do with sensitive topics like religion.

We live in a society which is increasingly hostile to Christianity and to religion generally, and it is not without reason that we've become sensitive to what appear to be instances of discrimination against the Faith. Sometimes we jump to conclusions too quickly. I must confess myself to the fault of being too easily outraged. I have been compared to Don Quixote in my penchant for tilting at windmills. So when I read about what Concordia Publishing House perceived as discrimination against its ads for mentioning Jesus and the Bible, I was all set to close my Gmail accounts, stop using Google, and move my blogs from Blogger.

I'm not crazy about the fact that my reception when I called Google Adwords about this affair was so brusque, nor about the fact that I never received a response to my email on the subject to Google's media department. Very honestly, sites on which I had used my primary Google email address have been hacked no less than ten times, and I'm not crazy about the resulting spam, though Gmail actually has done a pretty good job in filtering it out given the huge quantity of it I find in my spam folder. There is frankly another email service I like better and I plan to use it as my primary email address going forward.

But I'm not going to move my blogs from Blogger or close my account, and neither should you. Google took the attitude it took toward CPH ads for reasons of privacy and for the protection of consumers, and not to discriminate against the Faith. And I don't think that should be held against them.

ADDENDUM: Here is another blog post on the controversy, and on the practice of retargeting- which is more cringy the more you think about it.