According to an Irish report, our personal information, including geolocation, is disseminated to thousands of companies on average nearly 400 times a day. The survey overwhelms advertisers, including Google and Microsoft, who engage in real-time bidding.
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[EN VIDÉO] The Incredible Journey of Global Internet Traffic When we connect to the Internet, our data travels a very long way. An email thus travels an average of 15,000 km to reach its destination!
Our personal data is shared hundreds of times a day. A report of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), titled “ biggest data breach », pinpoints advertisers and a practice called RTB or Real-Time Bidding (real-time bidding). It is she who determines which advertising are displayed in web pages or applications.
Pirates are rarely the mysterious characters that we imagine. In March, a teenager had accomplished the feat of hacking Microsoft. © Futura
When you load a page or app containing advertising, your profile, including your geolocation and the viewed content, is sent to an ad server. Different advertisers consult this information, cross-reference it with other data they already have, and then bid. It’s the one who wins who sees his advertisement displayed. The whole operation takes place automatically in a few hundred milliseconds.
Google and Microsoft lead the culprits
On average, the data of a European Internet user is exposed 376 times per day, or more specifically 340 times per day for France. In the United States, the number is much higher: American Internet users see their data shared an average of 747 times a day. Among the advertisers singled out, Google comes first with 21% of broadcasts RTB. The report also cites Microsoft (Xandr) and other big companies less known to the general public (Index Exchange, PubMatic, Magnite…).
Personal information is shared with many advertisers. Microsoft indicates for example that its Xandr platform can send data to 1,647 other companies. Although it is meant to be anonymized, once released, this data can be reused for other purposes. In the United States, information from the RTB has been used, among other things, to profile protesters from the movement Black Lives Matteror even for the outing of a catholic priest homosexual who used the Grindr app. It remains to be seen whether this practice will be able to continue in Europe. The Belgian Data Protection Authority is expected to decide soon whether the RTB is compatible with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which could have consequences across the EU.
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