To Monetize Is Not to Sell, Contends Google
April 7, 2020
Quite gradually, governments seem to be waking up to the problem of online privacy. The passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect on January first, is one example. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains how Google is sidling around the law’s provisions in its article, “Google Says it Doesn’t ‘Sell’ Your Data. Here’s How the Company Shares, Monetizes, and Exploits it.”
Journalist Bennett Cyphers reminds us just how far Google has cast its data nets: Worldwide, the company commands 62% of mobile and 69% of desktop browsers; the operating systems on 71% of mobile devices; 94% of apps in the Play store; and 92% of internet searches. It runs code on about 85% of the sites on the Web while 73% of adults in the US employ YouTube. That is a mind-boggling amount of data on billions of people.
Though Google makes tens of billions of dollars each year off this data, it claims it is not technically selling it. The write-up explains two ways the company splits that hair. First, it builds user profiles filled with statistics and interests that it then sells to advertisers. Marketers then use those profiles to craft targeted campaigns. The second method is called real-time bidding; Cyphers explains:
“Real-time bidding is the process by which publishers auction off ad space in their apps or on their websites. In doing so, they share sensitive user data—including geolocation, device IDs, identifying cookies, and browsing history—with dozens or hundreds of different ad tech companies. Each RTB auction typically sees user data passing through three different layers of companies on its way from a device to an advertiser: supply-side platforms (or SSPs) collect user data to sell, ad exchanges organize auctions between them and advertisers, and demand-side platforms (or DSPs) ‘bid’ on behalf of advertisers to decide which ads to show to which people. These auctions take milliseconds, constantly churning away in the background of your browsing activity as companies at every level of the process share and collect more and more data to add to their existing profiles of users. … Real-time bidding is a convoluted, opaque system of data collection and sharing that enables profiling and surveillance by advertisers, data brokers, hedge funds, and ICE. It is at the center of everything that’s wrong with privacy in tech.”
The article describes how Google got this much power and elaborates on how it wields it, complete with
Illustrations and examples. Navigate there for those details. Not surprisingly, Cyphers concludes with a call for stronger laws, ones that make privacy the default setting. Is it too late to re-bottle that genie?
Cynthia Murrell, April 7, 2020
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