April 28 (UPI) -- Google announced Thursday users can limit ads on sensitive topics, such as weight loss, dating, parenting and pregnancy.
The move is an add-on to a feature rolled out in December 2020, which allowed users in the United States to limit YouTube ads on alcohol and gambling by adjusting their ad settings.
The feature to limit alcohol and gambling ads was later expanded to allow users to limit the same ads globally across Google Ads and YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Now, users worldwide can also limit ads in the newly announced sensitive categories as well.
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The four new ad sensitive categories -- weight loss, dating, parenting and pregnancy -- were based on user feedback.
"We conduct user surveys and try to understand what kinds of categories they are interested in us adding," Karin Hennessy, Google's group product manager for ads privacy, told The Washington Post. "The very next four categories were parenting, pregnancy, dating and weight loss. It's all based on what we perceive as sensitive categories, but also very much on what we're hearing from users."
Hennesy told The Verge that Google will "continue to listen to user feedback and study which categories to expand this feature to in the future."
Google users can go to their ad settings page, scroll to "Sensitive ad categories on YouTube," and click on the "See Fewer" button to limit these ads.
A Google support page warns that users may still see ads that refer to the sensitive categories when searching for or viewing related content. The page cites as an example "an airline ad featuring someone drinking a glass of champagne."
