The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns about 'real-time bidding' that puts privacy on the auction block
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization established with the aim of protecting freedom and privacy in the digital society, has summarized the problems with '
Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here's How | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-fuel-surveillance-industry-heres-how
Real-time bidding (RTB) is a system that exposes users' personal information to countless advertisers and brokers every time a targeted ad is displayed. If abused, it could reveal information about a user's sexual orientation, where they were, and what they were doing.
In the past, it has been used by Catholic groups to identify gay priests and to identify participants in political protests, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said.
Here's how RTB basically works:
1. When a user visits a site or app that has ad space, the site or app asks an ad auction company to decide which ad to display.
2) The ad auction company compiles information about you, the content you are trying to view, and other information into a “bid request” that is then sent out to thousands of potential advertisers.
3. Bid requests may contain data such as a unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device information, interests, demographic information, etc. This 'bid stream data' can easily be linked to you.
4. Advertisers decide whether to bid using the personal information included in the bid request and the user data profiles they have built up over the years.
The biggest problem with this process is that it gives personal information to all advertisers who participate in RTB, regardless of whether they buy ad space or not.
While some ad auction companies have policies in place that prohibit them from selling bid stream data, RTB has become a major source of confidential data for data brokers.
And rather than just enabling companies to collect data, RTB creates an incentive for them to scrape together as much of it as possible, because the more personal information included in a bid request, the higher the bid.
Advertisers also want to buy as much data as possible to inform their decisions, which further motivates data brokers to track people's online lives.
Because RTB is built into most websites and apps, the scale of privacy violations by the online advertising industry is unimaginably huge: according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hundreds of billions of RTB bid requests are broadcast every day. With each bid, thousands of ad buyers can receive data, whether real or fake, and the business of reselling RTB data has developed into a major industry.
RTB is not just a privacy violation; it also poses a national security risk. In fact, Google's ad auctions were found to have leaked classified information to a Russian company that was subject to sanctions for several months.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 'How to protect yourself from RTB' is as follows:
・Website
Install Privacy Badger, a free browser extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to block online tracking.
You can download Privacy Badger here:
Privacy Badger - Chrome Web Store
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/privacy-badger/pkehgijcmpdhfbdbbnkijodmdjhbjlgp
Privacy Badger – Get the extension for Firefox (en)
https://addons.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/
・For apps
Disable your mobile advertising ID and carefully check the app's permissions. On Android, go to 'Settings' and then 'Security & Privacy.'
From now on, 'Privacy Management'
'advertisement'
Tap 'Delete Advertising ID' to delete the advertising ID.
On iPhone, you can opt out of allowing apps to track you when you first start using them. To check which apps you've allowed to track you in the past, go to Settings > Security & Privacy.
Next, tap 'Tracking.'
You can check the permission status on this screen.
However, these are merely individual self-defense measures.
As a fundamental solution, the Electronic Frontier Foundation proposed: 'The best way to prevent online advertising from aiding in user surveillance is to ban behavioral advertising , so that ads are targeted to you based on the content and context of the page you're currently viewing, and don't collect or expose sensitive information about you. Viewing an ad shouldn't mean handing over your data to countless companies you've never heard of. It's time to end targeted advertising and the mass surveillance it enables.'
Related Posts:
in Web Service, Security, Posted by log1l_ks