It is called Real time bidding, and it is the activity that is carried out by the creators of the sites to track the online behavior of people: according to a recent analisi dell’Irish Council for Civil Libertiesan Irish civil liberties nonprofit, is done countless times a day for every person in both the United States and Europe. Despite the GPDRthe regulation that should protect the privacy of EU citizens.
So-called user monetization is essential for commercial activities: analytics on people’s behavior are sold to advertisers, who then direct targeted advertising to them. We talk about bidding because thousands of advertisers compete in the auction and in real time for the most interesting profiles: people capable of spending, interested in the search for certain goods or services, even ready to foresee things that consumers themselves do not yet know. For instance, predict pregnancy before testing is done (and statistically it is very accurate, based on the types of browsing behavior and purchase profiles).
According to the Irish Council, Google and other key adtech players (the online advertising industry) in the “continuous surveillance-based high-speed advertising auction system” process and transmit people’s data “billions of times a day”. According to the authors of the report, “Real time bidding is the biggest data breach ever recorded: every day, it tracks and shares what people see online and their position in the real world. 294 billion times in the United States and 197 billion times in Europe “.
Privacy
The Schrems judgment and Google Analytics: what will happen to European ecommerce?
by Emanuele Capone
06 February 2022
youtube: Apple’s new privacy spot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UyBGbf2s54
Coincidentally, Apple just recently got started the new advertising campaign Your data is being Sold (in Italian: They are selling your data) based above all on a commercial that, with a tone reminiscent of Harry Potter, aims to underline how Cupertino products and services manage to stop these continuous auctions of personal data. For the company, privacy preferences are “a fundamental human right” and the technologies they enable screen the address from which you connect to the Networkdo not show one’s name or e-mail address, mask the digital identity when accessing the sites so as not to be recognizable and therefore traceable, are in fact considered a unique element in the market.
Apple pursues this policy for some time and has influenced the behavior of other companiesbut above all its way of processing user data, effectively limiting the exposure of data and personal behavior, has already caused significant shifts in advertisers’ advertising investments on platforms such as Meta and Google. Apple also tries to explain to the market what the risks are related to online exposure and how to mitigate them.
The harms of using adtech push forms such as high speed advertising auctions are considered very strong by the Irish non-profit organization: “There is no way to limit the use of auction data after have been transmitted, ”the report reads, according to which “data brokers used them to profile Black Lives Matter protesters. The United States Department of Security and other agencies have used them for warrantless cell phone monitoring. They were used to force the coming out of a gay Catholic priest discovered on Grindr (gay community dating app) ”. Indeed, “the ICCL has discovered the sale of auction data they reveal likely victims of sexual abuse”.