It’s no secret that we are regularly tracked every time we use the internet. Most people also understand that the main business model online is surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising collects and aggregates large amounts of personal data to inform targeted digital advertising. Although these facts are well known, there is still a lack of detailed analysis of what exactly happens when you browse pages or make purchases online. This makes a new study by the respected nonprofit Consumer Reports on the nature and scale of surveillance advertising in the United States especially welcome, even if its findings are alarming.
The report notes that there have been several important recent achievements in privacy law and technology. These impose what the company calls “moderate constraints on the surveillance economy.” New privacy laws have been enacted, including the California Consumer Privacy Act. Give consumers the right to opt out of tracking by introducing measures such as requiring businesses to work with consumers’ designated “authorized agents” to exercise their privacy rights. There is. Additionally, Apple and Firefox digital platforms have deployed technology that limits the ability of sites and apps to track users across different contexts.
Ironically, these successes have introduced a new and previously underappreciated problem: data flow between servers. The direct transfer of data from companies to digital platforms such as Meta takes place outside of your browser or app in order to facilitate the publication of targeted advertisements (e.g. on your Facebook page). Therefore, it is invisible to the user and cannot be directly controlled by the user.
However, Mr. Meta Download your information This tool provides some insight into transfers between these servers. Consumer Reports used his more than 6 million members to encourage people to sign up for a Facebook surveillance study. This data can then be aggregated to reveal the extent to which companies transfer personal data between servers. Targeted advertising. A total of 709 sets of data were collected and analyzed. Although this is a relatively small sample, it serves as a first insight into what is happening in the United States.
Consumer Reports’ research reveals:
- Over 186,000 different companies submitted data to Meta about 709 participants.
- Each of these 186,000+ companies shared data with an average of eight people who participated in the survey.
- The average participant in this study was identified in the data by 2,230 different companies. Some have been identified by more than 7,000 companies.
- The company that shared data on the most participants was data broker LiveRamp, which shared data on 679 study participants (96%).
Aside from data brokers, the most common types of businesses that appeared in volunteer data were personal brands and direct-to-consumer brands. Famous US retailers such as Amazon and Walmart also appeared frequently. Perhaps even more surprising are the following results from the data analysis.
Many of the advertisers targeting the largest percentage of study participants do not have a national footprint. For example, the Illinois Lottery shared data on nearly 70% of its volunteers. Local car dealers are also surprisingly well represented in the sample data, suggesting that they often have access to large marketing lists derived from national sources. For example, a car dealership in San Benito, Texas (population 24,665) was responsible for transmitting information on approximately 10% of survey volunteers, but only 6.6 survey volunteers resided in the entire state of Texas. %is. Several other local car dealerships (including, for example, a Porsche dealership in a small town) also utilized the contact information of approximately 10% of the volunteers.
This suggests that even relatively small companies can collect, or purchase access to, large amounts of personal data for targeted advertising purposes. This isn’t just about digital giants like Amazon. Additionally, very specific microtargeting also seems easy and common, as Consumer Reports explains:
Additionally, 96,000 (52%) businesses targeted only 1 in 709 volunteers. This likely reflects the ease with which Meta Ad Manager can be tried out by small and medium-sized businesses with limited marketing resources. Meta makes it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to deploy advanced monitoring advertising technology. Small business owners just need to set a budget, provide their customers’ personal information, and report their customers’ purchasing behavior to Meta, and Meta’s software does the rest.
Consumer Reports’ data not only provides valuable information for the first time about server-to-server data transfer practices, but also reveals significant issues. Many of the assumed company names found in the data could not be associated with actual business entities. . For example, some names consist of a string of letters and numbers that cannot be deciphered, such as “Bm 5 100tkqc nlm.”This is Facebook’s Download your information This tool actually provides only limited transparency as it is impossible to parse large parts of the data. Other factors that reduce its usefulness include the widespread use of intermediaries to buy online advertising. This makes it nearly impossible for consumers to understand who is doing what with their data.
In addition to calling for true transparency from companies like Meta, the study also makes a number of other policy recommendations. These include enacting data minimization provisions in privacy laws, empowering authorized agents to make rights requests, and making archives of all ads shown to users publicly searchable. This includes configuring it in a usable format. This mirrors similar provisions in the EU’s new Digital Services Act. This informative report concludes that “American consumers deserve the same level of insight into the advertising market as European consumers, rather than the mysterious black box that it is today.”
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