So important I posted it twice:
- Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales.
- The figure rises to 747 times daily for US-based users.
- The revenue from digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.
- (Not for long, says Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis, 2020)
The Data:
- Device the page is loading on
- Location details
- Previous websites visited and their subject matter
- This data is used to secure the most relevant bidder for the advert space on the page
- This all happens automatically, in a fraction of a second, and is a multi-million dollar industry
- Personally-identifying information is not included, but campaigners argue that the volume of the data is still a violation of privacy
- Figures do NOT include numbers from Facebook and Amazon, only Google
- US web users' habits are shared in advert sales processes 107 trillion times per year
- European users' data is shared 71 billion times per year
via the Irish Council for Civil Liberties: The Biggest Data Breach: ICCL report on the scale of Real-Time Bidding data broadcasts in the U.S. and Europe, May 2022.
***
People forget, but in 2006 AOL released search data, but took it back down the same day when they realized that you could very easily re-identify the people in the data. There was a competition to prove this, done on both Netflix and Twitter users.
The internet doesn't forget.
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