Study Reveals Privacy Threats of Real-Time Bidding

A recent report exposes the extent and uncontrollable nature of adtech tracking and consumer targeting. Experts call it the “biggest data breach” and fear little could be done to roll it back, save for personal privacy solutions.

Real-Time Tracking and Ad Bidding Run Rampant, Online Privacy Harder to Maintain

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has published an in-depth report on tracking and ad targeting. The study exposes real-time bidding (RTB) as one of the most significant current threats to consumer privacy.

Data collected on RTB practices around the world shows that Google and other tech giants often base their ad auction systems and commercial practices on surveillance technology. As much as consumers might think they are aware of this approach, people’s data seems to be accessed and tracked billions of times per day, with a scale and frequency which largely differs from what most companies might wish to admit.

RTB is one of the leading reasons why the demand for anonymity tools like 4g LTE proxies and other advanced privacy apps is constantly on the rise. Market experts see the approach as a serial data breach on a large scale since most mobile and smart technology tracks real-time consumer location and online behavior billions of times per day.

In the US alone, people are tracked nearly 300 billion times per day while Europe comes second with around 200 tracking instances daily. Consequently, this information is handed over to third parties and commercial partners unless people use state-of-the-art privacy solutions as well as dedicated “ethical” search engines and apps. Recipients include companies across the globe, including China and Russia, and what happens thereafter is completely out of the hands of initial RTB tech providers.

The ICCL obtained industry data from confidential sources yet it is only an estimate of what US and EU users are subjected to in their online journey. States like Colorado and countries like the UK are the most exposed, with 987 and 462 RTB broadcast instances per unit/person per day. Even the least vulnerable – the likes of Romania and the US District of Columbia – experience an estimated 149 and 486 real-time privacy breaches per person/day.

The ICCL report stresses that these figures are conservative estimates since they include primary data from Google and Microsoft. The former is the biggest RTB player and sells access to collected data to almost 5 thousand companies in the US alone, while the latter sends it to 1647 firms. Although adjusted for industry standards, it is crucial to realize that final figures do not account for possibly more aggressive RTB broadcast policies on behalf of Meta (Facebook) and Amazon.

Is Europe’s GDPR Enforced Properly?

Digital anonymity and security have been at the top of consumer concerns in mature markets for over a decade, an industry research on privacy tools and standards reveals. RTB is a particularly sensitive topic in the European Union where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in force since early 2018.

The survey shows that such awareness has been on the rise to almost similar levels in the US and Australia, especially after a series of high-profile data-sharing and privacy breach scandals. Both European and North American users pursue anonymity at the cost of content access even, although both are achievable through a number of proxy and VPN tools.

Germans top the privacy awareness list with 44% proxy users, with Australians also right behind (43%). Consumers of all age cohorts have shown rising technical skills and related knowledge boosting privacy markets to unprecedented levels.

The biggest worry, at least in Europe right now, is that regulators should actually be enforcing the strict privacy rights of consumers under common market rules. Yet, adtech firms and major digital platforms seem to be practically out of control, leaving the initiative for individual privacy protection to users themselves.

(Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)