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The Pwned website shows you which websites your account details have been leaked for. Is there one to show you what the ad industry has on you, and perhaps how it can by it? If people had insight to this for how much longer would this be a problem? I imagine there’s a website that does this which was launched five years ago.
Had a similar experience - worked in a big ad agency who hired a new web-developer for one of our clients. As they are one of the biggest website providers, they could identify most of the people that visited a client's site - it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database.
> it even automatically saved the identified user's profile pic from facebook into their database. Please share more information. Did that require the user to be logged into FB?
The Pwned website shows you which websites your account details have been leaked for. Is there one to show you what the ad industry has on you, and perhaps how it can by it? If people had insight to this for how much longer would this be a problem? I imagine there’s a website that does this which was launched five years ago.
the thing is, in theory all of this data is pseudonymous, or even anonymous, as the industry creates all of these profiles and does not attach real names to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As for GDPR: at least in Germany it's problematic. Our system typically relies on competitors to enforce law abidance in companies (so called "Abmahnungen" based on the "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb", UWG for short, a set of laws regarding unlawful competition). One court recently ruled that GDPR violations don't fall under those laws ( https://www.datenschutzbeauftragter-info.de/landgericht-stut... ). That…
Unless the site is only available to German users, you should be able to file a complain with any of EU member state regulators, and not all are so timid as that. NOYB, the non-profit org founded by Max Schrems, has already been filing complaints with the French, Austrian, Belgian and German authorities: https://noyb.eu/
You can, but they will forward that to the applicable authority, which will be the local German one for German sites.
The Pwned website shows you which websites your account details have been leaked for. Is there one to show you what the ad industry has on you, and perhaps how it can by it? If people had insight to this for how much longer would this be a problem? I imagine there’s a website that does this which was launched five years ago.
the thing is, in theory all of this data is pseudonymous, or even anonymous, as the industry creates all of these profiles and does not attach real names to it.
I mean, even without originating an actual ID, how many bits do you think it takes to uniquely identify you in your geo? It wouldn't take much in the way of resources to track everyone in the US who uses the internet; a few trackers on popular websites, localization services: I'd be shocked if there weren't things like this in existence already for bail bondsmen/private investigator types.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the thing is, in theory all of this data is pseudonymous, or even anonymous, as the industry creates all of these profiles and does not attach real names to it.
Even government departments trying their very best to anonymise data tend to mess it up, what makes you think an advertising company has any interest in doing the same? Their entire existence is built upon deanonymising and monetising that data.
Privacy International did a piece on this kind of ad-tech data survaillance and they were saying "Here is the shocking details what an ad-company knew about me when I asked them to share everything with me in line with GDPR"
Then I emailed Privacy International, asking: How did they even knew your real name?
To which they replied "Oh, yes, we forgot to add that to the article, I actually gave them my name and my cookies, so they could tie all their cookie IDs to my name"
PI promised to add this "small detail" to the article. They never did: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2433/i-asked-onli...
They also promised to write an article about the implications of pseudonymous data and the possible link to real identities, which they also never did.
I have yet to see a real whistleblower report by someone deep into the ad industry revealing whats really going on there. There are almost no details about what's really happening on a technical level (beyond the little things we already know), and whether large data sets are abused in the sense that they get routinely de-anonymised.
Advertising is applied sociology. As such, advertisers want to aggregate large data sets into large segments that are easy to manipulate statistically. (Where the central limit theorem starts working.)
There is no demand for personal data or de-anonymization because that stuff doesn't sell.
The personal data collection is done by Google, Facebook at al not for advertising purposes. They're collecting it because they view it as a resource and a currency in the future de-anonymized world. (Think China's "social capital" except on a larger scale.)
Source: I've worked in the ad industry for over 15 years.