So you pop over to Google to find a flight to Albuquerque or an aquarium for your kid, and suddenly you're being hit with come-ons from luxury companies inducing you to forget the recession that's raging and drop some of your hard-earned bucks on their baubles.

What's going on here? The search giant has found yet another new and potentially lucrative way of segmenting customers for its advertisers. It's targeting users by their FICO scores.

Google and a data analytics firm just launched a pilot program consisting of 2 million web-browsing Americans. If the pilot goes well, those of us with pristine credit (720 and up) can expect to see more ads for higher-priced goods and services and luxury items when we use the search engine.

So, how does Google get your credit score? That's easy; you give it to them. According to this article about the pilot program, the 2 million users let their credit info be pulled when they signed up for a credit card. So for now, the program is opt-in. In other words, you still have to explicitly tell them, "Yes, please use my personal financial history as a tool to sell me more junk!" If the program takes off, though, it's not a stretch to imagine such "permission" worming its way into the standard contracts of bank and retail credit cards as Google gets hungry for more information.

Initially, Google expects to primarily attract credit-card companies with this FICO targeting. It's a sign of the times. As recently as a couple of years ago, you could practically get a credit card with nothing more than a pulse. Now, card issuers only want the cream of the crop (although they'll still charge even their best customers ever-rising interest rates for the privilege of doing business with them).

Manufacturers and retailers of luxury goods, which have been hard-hit by the recession, are also expected to jump at the chance to reach high-score consumers. By targeting those Americans who are capable of paying off a big-ticket purchase over a long period of time, these peddlers of high-end stuff can avoid lowering their eye-popping prices.

Google took pains to stress that it doesn't have access to individual Americans' credit scores, since the technological wizardry the search engine uses to carve users into specific segments preserves a bit of anonymity. Still, the overall premise is galling. It's more than a little disconcerting to think that the very fiscal responsibility that earned you that good credit score in the first place is being bought and sold in the hopes that you'll fling aside restraint and succumb to advertising.