The Biggest Data Breach Ever

Privacy Files

You might not be familiar with the term Real-Time Bidding (RTB), but if you browse the web, you're likely participating in this privacy-compromising activity hundreds of time each day.

According to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), "RTB is the largest data breach ever recorded. It tracks and shares what people view online and their real-world location 294 billion times in the U.S. and 197 billion times in Europe every day."

In America, this intrusive activity exposes the average person's online activity and location 747 times every single day.

In this episode of Privacy Files, we pull back the curtain on the mysterious world of digital ad auctions and how RTB broadcasts are continuously comprising the personal data of unsuspecting web users.

RTB is essentially an automated auction where the buying and selling of ads takes place in the mere span of approximately 200 milliseconds. The auction begins the moment you click on a link and visit a page that displays ads. Before the page fully loads, the website's publisher sends available ad space dimensions to what's called the Supply-Side Platform.

From there, the Supply-Side Platform looks at your browser cookies to make assessments about your web activity, interests, demographics and so much more. This information will be used to determine which ad is most relevant to you.

Then the Demand-Side Platform assigns a value to you (the user) and places a bid on the ad space based on your cookie data.

Finally, the Supply-Side Platform receives the bids and picks a winner based on the highest and most relevant bid.

Once the ad is chosen, the webpage loads and the winning ad is revealed.

So what's the problem? Once personal data is broadcast via RTB, there's no control over where and how it might be used.

Companies involved in the auction can actually access the bid stream data even without bidding.

Furthermore, even though bid stream data is typically anonymized, it's relatively easy to match a user to their information. Data brokers can package the bid stream data (particularly valuable location data) and sell it to other companies and even governments with little oversight.

In all, there are 178 trillion RTB broadcasts about people in the US and Europe every year. And even worse, the RTB market is growing. One study forecasts the RTB market to reach $34.57 billion by 2027--a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25.2%.

To close out the episode, we give you some simple tips for protecting your personal data from RTB broadcasts.

Links Referenced:

https://mysudo.com/2022/07/this-is-why-you-should-worry-about-your-personal-information-in-targeted-advertising/

https://mysudo.com/2022/06/were-all-part-of-the-biggest-data-breach-everyday-mysudo-private-browsers-can-protect-you/

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/16/iccl-rtb-report-google-gdpr/

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/going-once-going-twice-sold-real-time-7645080/

https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Mass-data-breach-of-Europe-and-US-data-1.pdf

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/real-time-bidding-rtb-global-153700963.html

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