Tag Archive for: Digital Economy

Every time we search or surf the internet, an auction for our attention takes place behind the scenes. The whole thing takes milliseconds, is called “Real Time Bidding” (RTB) and is one of the sources of income for Google & Co.

Your Online Attention, Bought in an Instant” was the headline of the New York Times back in 2012. Back then, data-based real-time auctions accounted for only a small part of online ad sales. Today, it has become a $117 billion business that fuels the financial success of Google and other companies.

It is clear that we pay for supposedly free services with our data. But what does that mean in concrete terms? Who is passing on our personal data? And where does it end up? The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has now calculated the scope of Real Time Bidding and concludes that it is an “epic data breach”.

What is it about?

In real time bidding, advertising networks buy ad space on the internet for their customers in an auction. The whole thing takes place in milliseconds. The ads appear immediately in the search result environment.

The following happens approximately 178 trillion* times a year:

  • An ad space provider, for example Google, compiles a data dossier about the person searching and their online activities from various sources in real time. The data includes, for example, information about the device, search history, previously visited websites and their content, and details about the location.
  • The provider sends this dossier to potential advertisers or their intermediary networks.
  • With the help of the data dossier, the highest bidder can now display the advertising that is particularly well suited to the viewer (“targeted behavioural advertising”) on the advertising space purchased at auction.

According to the ICCL report, the figures look like this:

  • European users account for around 71 trillion “data leaks” per year.
  • Every day, RTB in Europe shares what we are watching online and where we are 197 billion times.
  • According to the ICCL, Google is the largest generator of such data transmissions. In Europe alone, Google transmits personal data to 1,058 companies about 42 billion times a day (surprisingly, in the US it is “only” 31 billion times, but 4,698 companies).
  • Google generates around 19.6 million “data broadcasts” per minute about the online behaviour of German internet users.

What does this mean for us personally?

In Europe, the data of an average European user is forwarded to third-party companies 376 times a day. If we are online in Germany, we are tracked approximately once per minute.

What’s so bad about it?

Civil libertarians from the ICCL and also some data protection authorities argue that real time bidding in its current form violates the General Data Protection Regulation. It states that personal data must be processed lawfully and fairly. The processing of personal data must be kept to a minimum. These principles would be massively violated by the RTB.

Crucial points are, for example:

  • Companies like Google and Bing and operators of other services send our data, some of it very personal, to companies around the globe, including Russia and China.
  • Once sent, there is no way to limit or control the use of RTB data. It is impossible to control what the third-party companies do with our data or who they share it with. This raises questions about the security and retention of this data.
  • Detailed profiles can be created from the data. For example, data brokers used it to profile Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
  • Sharing this personal data with third parties is done without properly assessing and removing the risk of these counterparties.
    And: no user has ever explicitly consented to this practice.

The ICCL concludes that Real Time Bidding is a threat to our fundamental rights and endangers our democracy. “Every day, the RTB industry tracks what you look at, no matter how private or sensitive, and records where you go. This is the biggest data breach ever recorded,” says Dr Johnny Ryan of the ICCL. “Conservative estimate: Google does this billions of times, every day.”

 

*(the figures are for the USA and Europe)

The report can be found on the ICCL website. At the bottom you will also find an informative video with Dr. Johnny Ryan.

ead the Wikipedia article on Real Time Bidding here. Further articles on the ICCL report can be found at Zeit, T3N, Deutschlandfunk Nova, the BBC and a very readable commentary at Bloomberg.

Read the Wikipedia article on Real Time Bidding here. Further articles on the ICCL report can be found at BBC and Bloomberg. German language articles at Zeit, T3N, Deutschlandfunk Nova.

Together with Samuel Sousa (Graz University of Technology) and Roman Kern (Know-Center GmbH), Christian Guetl (member of Open Search Foundation and Head of CoDiS Lab, TU Graz) published an article about the challenges and solutions of privacy in Open Search.

Here is the abstract:

“Privacy is of worldwide concern regarding activities and processes that include sensitive data. For this reason, many countries and territories have been recently approving regulations controlling the extent to which organizations may exploit data provided by people. Artificial intelligence areas, such as machine learning and natural language processing, have already successfully employed privacy-preserving mechanisms in order to safeguard data privacy in a vast number of applications. Information retrieval (IR) is likewise prone to privacy threats, such as attacks and unintended disclosures of documents and search history, which may cripple the security of users and be penalized by data protection laws.

This work aims at highlighting and discussing open challenges for privacy in the recent literature of IR, focusing on tasks featuring user-generated text data. Our contribution is threefold: firstly, we present an overview of privacy threats to IR tasks; secondly, we discuss applicable privacy-preserving mechanisms which may be employed in solutions to restrain privacy hazards; finally, we bring insights on the tradeoffs between privacy preservation and utility performance for IR tasks.”

The paper was accepted at #ossym2021 – Third International Open Search Symposium
Autors: Samuel Sousa, Christian Guetl, Roman Kern

Read the full article at arXivLabs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10720

„In most EU member countries, Google controls more than 90 percent of the search market. Sometimes, it controls much more”

Quelle: The Atlantic, 2015

Admittedly, the article “Europeans Use Google Way, Way More Than Americans Do” is a bit older. However, Robinson Meyer describes very well the situation of search engine use in Europe. Since 2015 this has not changed significantly.

„In most EU member countries, Google controls more than 90 percent of the search market. Sometimes, it controls much more: In Belgium, Germany, and Finland, it can claim more than 97 percent of all search engine use, according to a 2010 report by marketing research firm PTG Media.
By some measures, that’s some 30 percent more of the search market than Google controls in its home country. Estimates about Google market share in the United States put it between 67 and 75 percent of the search market.”

Full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/europeans-use-google-way-way-more-than-americans-do/390612/