Google wants to make you the new face of [insert brand name here] via a new revision to their terms of service. Basically, the company plans on taking anything you review or rate on Google Plus and offer it up to advertisers to use (like Facebook does) in social ads and shared endorsements.

The topic is a dicey one, and one that gets privacy advocates very riled up — Facebook has already had to settle a class action lawsuit relating to how they notified users about what they do with shared endorsements, as the NYT reports. And the EU Parliament is already considering legislation to deal with what they see as Google's overstepping privacy regulations and involving users in their advertising model without their explicit consent.

Both companies, Facebook and Google, want to continue to monetize their free products by turning us all into unwitting shills for Subway, Starbucks, and HP — that is if we are already boring enough to be raving about such brands in public, on brand pages, or on our own news feeds. Companies can now pay Facebook to repost any such endorsements across our friends' feeds, and Google wants to start doing the same in the coming months -- thus the announcement about the terms of service change. Google, at least, is saying that users under 18 will be automatically excluded from having their faces plastered onto these "shared endorsements." Also, you will be given the option of opting out, and they'll be doing plenty of notification around this.

Google Plus boasts 190 million users, not including the 390 million people who use it indirectly by sharing things on YouTube, etc. And this move by the company comes just as they're already dealing with a federal lawsuit over their policy of scanning users' Gmail accounts for keywords in order to delivery targeted ads.

In other news, 190 million people are using Google Plus for anything but Gmail? Come now.

[NYT]
[Tech Crunch]