Google has managed to put privacy advocates on fire once more, after announcing a new online advertising initiative designed to make ads even more relevant than before. Until now, users would see ads based on the content of the page they visited, but now Google wants to go even further, by launching an interest-based advertising program.

The initiative, still in beta phase, will be based on the user’s surfing habits, basically sneaking around the user’s browsing history to deliver ads that are as relevant as possible to users. This, as expected, has raised a lot of privacy issues, but Google already anticipated that, and detailed 3 key elements that they say should reflect their commitment to transparency and user choice.

First of all, Google said it has labeled most of the ads on the AdSense partner network, so users can click on them and find out more about how they serve ads and what information they use to deliver these ads.

Furthermore, users can access the Ads Preferences Manager tool, which allows them to view, delete, or add interest categories associated with their browser so that they can receive the ads that are most relevant to them. And finally, users can opt-out of the service.

This however wasn’t enough for privacy advocates to settle down. The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) demanded Google to make the opt-out feature the default one, while the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) called Google’s initiative a disaster.