How Many Times is your Online Privacy Violated a Day?
“Oh, they’re listening,” or “I googled sunglasses earlier and now I’m getting ads for them! They’re watching!” In 2022, if these scenarios haven’t happened to you yet, you’ve been lucky. On a daily basis an internet user’s privacy is being violated, making online privacy one of the biggest concerns when it comes to browsing the net.
With that said, how many times a day would you guess your privacy is being violated surfing the web? Once? Twice? A few dozen?
According to a new report from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), the actual number is in the hundreds. On average, a European user’s data is shared with advertising and adtech middlemen 376 times per day. The number for American’s is double that – 747 times a day.
What does that mean? That’s how often people online across the world are exposed to a process called “real-time bidding,” or RTB, says the ICCL. Real-Time Bidding is the process that advertisers use to place bids on advertising slots on a page, auction style. Every time you load a webpage, there is a span of about 200 milliseconds where the page shares data about you and your browser. Advertisers then offer a dollar amount to target their ads toward that bundle of data. The advertiser who bids the highest gets the spot, and their ad is displayed to you. RTB happens anywhere ads can be found – on your desktop, mobile browser and apps. So the next time you get an ad for those cute fuzzy slippers you searched for a few hours ago, don’t be surprised.
The number of times a person’s browser might be inadvertently forwarding their data depends on where that person is based. According to the ICCL report, for American’s, Colorado users were sending the most RTB requests at 987 per day.
Considering how RTB requests get fired off with every ad a person sees, you could consider these numbers a proxy for the number of ads a user is seeing per day too. When the report says that users in California are firing off 804 RTB requests per day, those requests are each tied to an ad – which means Californians are seeing around 800 ads per day across different mediums. On average, users in New York are seeing 814 ads a day.
Talking heads in the adtech industry will say that data RTB sends back to these adtech players isn’t necessarily “identifiable”, or tied to specific details like your name or email address. Instead, they’re said to contain “anonymous” information like your IP address or your location. However these details aren’t really as “anonymous” as industry figures think. Prosecutions and privacy issues have occurred due to RTB request information that users aren’t even aware they’re passing on a daily basis.
The hundreds and hundreds of daily requests that are sent out are a conservative estimate. Out of all of the middlemen in the online ad ecosystem, Facebook, Amazon and Google support the majority of these RTB requests. The ICCL’s report exclusively looked at Google’s activity, omitting the other two entirely.
Even one company is bad enough, as the ICCL estimates that Google’s passing of data goes to roughly 4,700 middlemen, all operating with relatively little scrutiny. Time will tell how and if processes to control these types of privacy violating requests might be regulated in the future.
Story via Gizmodo
