Privacy campaigners’ war on real-time bidding – the engine room of the adtech industry – has been ratcheted up to the max, with claims that RTB tracks and shares what consumers view online and their real-world location 178 trillion times a year in Europe and the US.
That is the damning conclusion of a new report by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties by Dr Johnny Ryan, a long-term campaigner against RTB, who filed one of the first GDPR complaints about the practice nearly four years ago.
It reveals that on average, a person in the US has their online activity and location exposed 747 times every day by the RTB industry, This is more than double the figure for Europe, where RTB exposes people’s data 376 times a day.
The ICCL report also claims that Google allows 4,698 companies to receive RTB data about American consumers, and European and American Internet users’ private data is sent to firms across the globe, including to Russia and China, without any means of controlling what is then done with the information.
Even in Germany, which has one of the strictest data protection regimes in the world, Google sends 19.6 million broadcasts about German Internet users’ online behaviour every minute that they are online.
The ICCL said even these figures are a low estimate, as they do not include Facebook or Amazon RTB broadcasts.
On Twitter Ryan claimed the report was “staggering”, and added: “There is a significant difference between the scale of the problem in the US and the EU. If you live in New York your online activity and location are broadcast an average of 814 times per day. If you live in France, it happens 340 times a day.”
The original complaint – filed with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office – on behalf of tech start-up Brave, the Open Rights Group and University College London was lodged in September 2018, aimed at triggering an EU-wide GDPR investigation into the practice.
Two years ago, ICCL claimed the abuse was even more widespread and consumers’ highly personal details up for grabs tens of billions of times a day.
This latest study suggests it is now a global problem, although it is not known whether the ICCL has made any official complaints to the US authorities.
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