16 May 2022: Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is $117+ billion industry that operates behind the scenes on websites and apps. It tracks what you are looking at, no matter how private or sensitive, and it records where you go. Every day it broadcasts this data about you to a host of companies continuously, enabling them to profile you.
This report presents the scale of this data breach for the first time.
Key insights
- RTB is the biggest data breach ever recorded. It tracks and shares what people view online and their real-world location 178 Trillion times every year in U.S. & Europe.
- On average, a person in the U.S. has their online activity and location exposed 747 times every day by the RTB industry.
- 4,698 companies are allowed by Google to receive RTB data about people in the U.S.
- In Europe, RTB exposes people’s data 376 times a day.
- Google sends 19.6 million broadcasts about German Internet users’ online behaviour every minute that they are online.
- Europeans and U.S. Internet users’ private data is sent to firms across the globe, including to Russia and China, without any means of controlling what is then done with the data.
ICCL is working to end the RTB data breach, and has litigation ongoing in three European courts.
- at Landgericht Hamburg against the tracking industry standards body IAB TechLab, and against Microsoft's online advertising exchange Xandr https://www.iccl.ie/rtb-june-2021/.
- at the Irish High Court against the Data Protection Commission, for its failure to investigate our complaint about the Google's RTB data breach https://www.iccl.ie/news/iccl-sues-dpc-over-failure-to-act-on-massive-google-data-breach/
- at the Brussels Market Court, ICCL is a party against IAB Europe's appeal of an order by the Belgian Data Protection Authority, and 27 other EU data protection authorities, against IAB Europe's "TCF" consent spam system. https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/
Video: learn about Real-Time Bidding
Press materials
For comment: Dr Johnny Ryan
For media queries: Sinead.Nolan@iccl.ie +353874157162
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