i mentioned in a video recently that
google sells your data a bunch of people
responded and said well actually it says
on their website we do not sell your
personal information to anyone the ceo
of google reiterated this in a new york
times op-ed google will never sell any
personal information to third parties um
the truth is that google is sharing your
personal and sensitive information and
being compensated handsomely in return
but what's actually going on in this
exchange is far worse than you can
possibly imagine let's dive into the
details google is foremost an ad company
in the first quarter of this year alone
google made 54 billion dollars from
advertising they make browsers and
mobile phones and everything but it's
all designed to feed back into their ad
business bennett ciphers is a staff
technologist at eff their business is
collecting as much data as they can and
sharing that data strategically so that
they can charge as much money as
possible for each ad impression a big
part of google's ad business includes
things like search ads and youtube ads
that we're all familiar with but another
big part is third-party ads there are a
lot of different websites and apps that
are trying to sell ad space like
millions and there are a lot of
different advertisers that are trying to
buy ad space google acts as the
facilitator connecting them whenever you
see an ad on a website like new york
times or you see it on an app like just
a random weather app the odds are google
is involved in serving that ad to you
when you first load one of these pages
there'll be an empty rectangle on the
page
which will be about to contain an ad and
there's a split second
where you're waiting you can see the
editorial content has appeared and
you're just waiting for that to get
pushed down by the ad johnny ryan is a
senior fellow at the irish council for
civil liberties he explained to me that
in that split second it takes for an ad
to appear a high-speed automated auction
is taking place the publisher of that
app or website has a company working for
them and they say to that company put
the most amount of money in that
rectangle that you possibly can in many
cases it's google who's working to fill
that rectangle for them google will list
the empty rectangle on a big auction
site and invite a bunch of companies to
place bids on it whoever wins the bid
gets to put their ad in the rectangle
the process is called real time bidding
and one of these high speed auctions
occurs every time you see an ad space
being filled information about each
rectangle is also shared so that
advertisers can make sure that the ad
space is valuable to them but that
information isn't focused on where the
ad is located is focused on who is
currently looking at that rectangle the
auction is for your eyeballs thousands
of different advertisers will all be
shown the data about me this is bennett
cipher's cookie id xyz this is what we
know about him this is the app he has
open right now who wants to bid on that
each of those thousands of different
companies on the other side of the
auction will
receive that piece of information they
will have some kind of algorithm that
automatically determines whether they
want to bid on the right to show me an
ad they will all submit their bids the
ad exchange will decide on the winning
bid and then allow that advertiser to
load the ad onto my device and this all
happens within like 50 to 100
milliseconds how is the data about you
collected in the first place a company
like google will install code in
millions of different apps and websites
that code will collect data about the
people who are visiting those apps and
websites data like their geolocation
device id identifying cookies browsing
history for a long time we were very
much in the dark about just how much
usable information google was getting
from all of this but the irish council
for civil liberties discovered a
document that gives us more insight than
ever before into the magnitude of this
data sharing scheme it's a document
called the iab audience taxonomy iab is
one of two companies that set industry
standards for this real-time bidding
process google is the other their
audience taxonomy document breaks down
how people get categorized in this rtb
system it's got religion do you work in
defense procurement online gambling
offline gambling marijuana stds the code
357 would categorize you as a person who
has a child with special needs how much
is in your bank account cancer different
types of cancer how long is left in your
mortgage what you're reading watching
and listening to inferences of your
sexual preferences your health condition
your political views and your physical
locations sometimes right down to your
gps coordinates just do a search and
you'll see things like latitude and
longitude you get the idea this isn't an
information leak they call it the bid
fire hose because it's a fully fledged
deluge of personal and sensitive
information being spewed out about all
of us for anyone to collect every second
we're on the internet it's our secrets
it's our movements
and they are being broadcast let's
reiterate an important point it's not
like google selling data directly to one
other party who's buying it they're just
sort of putting it out there and people
are collecting it they're giving away
all your data for free it's everything
that makes you tick
and it's just being vented vented for
all these companies to see whether they
end up paying google for ad placements
or not so which companies are involved
on the collection side it's not just
google facilitating these auctions there
are many companies collecting and
broadcasting information about you
google is considered one of the biggest
because they have the most success in
getting paid for their information but
many other companies are just as privacy
invading including companies that you've
never even heard of who don't even have
wikipedia pages companies like facebook
and amazon also have their own rtb
system that we're not even going to go
into and then the number of companies on
the receiving end of this data is in
another ballpark each facilitator
involved has their own list of
authorized buyers these are the
companies that they admit to showing
their data to google's list contains 4
698 companies in the us and 1058
companies in europe microsoft recently
bought a big ad exchange called zander
zander says it can share your data with
about a thousand six hundred companies
each rtb facilitator is incentivized to
show their data to a large number of
companies you want the most possible
attention
on this bid request to solicit the best
possible ad response who exactly are all
these companies getting all your data
sometimes there are companies that have
an ad business but they're also a data
broker on the side sometimes there are
companies that are just pretending to
have an ad business and they're really
just involved in these auctions so that
they can gather this data profile people
and then sell those profiles of people
for other purposes there are companies
that this is their whole business model
they sit in the ad auctions they collect
all of the location tagged bid requests
that they can selling them to whoever
for who knows what purpose this is not
advertisers
this is a bunch of different tech firms
that do all sorts of weird and wacky
things they also share a lot of
information with each other it is a data
free for all in almost every sense so
hundreds of times a day your very
personal data is being shared with
thousands of companies and then passed
along to thousands more things like your
real-time location data just out there
for grabs this is like millions of data
points about where individual people are
at the time that they have apps open and
then they'll put those together to track
people over time and sell this raw
location data to you know real estate
developers to hedge funds to other
advertisers and to the government
there's a company called ventel their
whole business model is collecting
location data about people that comes
from apps and they sell it to the us
military to the fbi
uh the irs has bought it they probably
sell it to intelligence agencies
it's insane and that's just in america
like we have no idea what's going on
overseas if you look at google's list of
the companies that can receive these
data it includes for example companies
in russia companies in china they're
being told where you are right now what
you're looking at online and that is
accompanied with id codes so that they
can connect that to where you were in
the real world a minute ago and what you
were reading a minute ago and last week
and last month they can stitch it
together there are
bounty hunters that have bought location
data on the open market and put it up
for sale for a couple hundred bucks for
anyone who's trying to track down
someone who might have skipped bail or
something there's really no way to know
the extent of what's being done with the
data on the other side it's being called
the biggest data breach in history the
biggest data breach we've ever had
repeated daily that's one way to think
about this problem this information is
out there and what it can be used for is
only limited by our imagination it's so
available it's so cheap the reason it's
able to be collected in the first place
is often because we choose products that
openly tell us we're collecting your
information and we click the accept
button on the terms of service anyway
this was designed to you know
manufacture consent so that these giant
companies can keep making a lot of money
most of us don't even read the privacy
policies that we agree to but even if we
did it likely wouldn't help privacy
policies are oftentimes a joke the only
purpose of a privacy policy is to shield
the company who wrote it from legal risk
down the road and then there are the
marketing campaigns that assure us that
you shouldn't worry about all this stuff
anyway they have hundreds and hundreds
of people on staff writing ad copy and
drawing those cute little gummy person
images to try and convince people that
like oh no actually targeted ads are
your friends we're really careful with
your data we never share it with anyone
we don't sell your data the propaganda
from the companies that are making the
most money off of this stuff seeps in
and it and it does make an impression on
people it just gives you this sort of
like vague sense of trust this brings us
back to the word acrobatics that started
off this video is google selling your
data they're harvesting your data
they're sharing your data they're
getting paid handsomely thanks to all
this data but they claim
uh that legally they do not technically
sell your data and therefore they don't
think they should be subject to laws
like the california consumer privacy act
that regulate how your data can be sold
so the big question is what can we do to
protect ourselves so often companies
manage to find workarounds to bypass
data laws and i'm not convinced that
simply having better laws will be a
panacea shining a spotlight on what's
going on is a great first step and
holding companies accountable is also
important but you are more empowered
than you realize you can make a big
difference in how much data about you is
broadcast simply by making more
conscious choices about your digital
life once you install an app there's
very little that you can do
to control what the app does with the
data that it has access to but you can
choose not to install that app you can
choose a browser with better privacy
protections use a better email service
use end-to-end encrypted communication
all of this greatly reduces the amount
of data that companies get access to in
the first place and finally just you
know be aware of this talk to your
friends because this whole thing exists
because people don't pay enough
attention to it and you know if everyone
gets mad at the same time i think things
will change it's been with us for over a
decade and it's time for it to clean up
its act