A pair of nifty-looking translation glasses came alongside Pixel phones, watches, and earbuds at Google’s annual showcase of software and devices last week. When you see a person speaking another language, wear them and have real-time “subtitles” appear on the lens. Brilliant. But the glasses are not commercially available. It is also unlikely that they will make anywhere near as much money as advertising. Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. For the quarter ended March 31, 2022, of the company’s $68 billion in total revenue, approximately $54 billion came from advertising.
The scope of our own, unintentional involvement in that business is also incomparable with any other time in history.
Every time you open an app on your phone or browse the web, your iris is auctioned off behind the scenes, thanks to a thriving market for personal data. Reducing the size of that market has always been difficult, but a new report from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, which has campaigned aggressively for years in the US and Europe to put limits on the trade of digital data, has now put a Got it, understand it. The report, which the council shared with Bloomberg Opinion, says advertising platforms transmit the location data and browsing habits of Americans and Europeans about 178 trillion times each year. According to the report, Google transmits the same kind of data in both regions more than 70 billion times a day.
It’s hard for humans to conceptualize numbers like these, even if machines calculate them comfortably every day – but if the exhaust of our personal data could be viewed in the same way as pollution, we’d be surrounded by an almost impenetrable haze. Which will get thicker. The more we interact with our phones. Quantified another way: According to the data, through online activity and location, a person in the US faces real-time bidding 747 times per day. The council says its unnamed source has exclusive access to the manager of an advertising campaign run by Google. (The figure does not include personal data transmitted by Meta Platform Inc.’s Facebook or Amazon.com Inc.’s advertising networks, meaning the true measure of all broadcast data is probably too large.)
Why does any of this matter? The apps are mostly free and useful, and there are no obvious negative consequences for the data being mined digitally.
Except, there have been. At least one large ad network has admitted to passing user data to the Department of Homeland Security and other government entities to track mobile phones without warrant, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. The exact activities of people using the gay-dating app Grindr were also made publicly available for purchase from the mobile-advertising company, until Grindr stopped sharing location data with ad networks two years ago. Was. But last year, The Pillar, a Catholic news publication, was still able to track a priest’s location on Grindr using a “commercially available record” of data from the app, and before publishing it to his office, home and office. Saw him traveling between different gay bars. The story about his “serial sexual misconduct”. It is still unclear how The Pillar got this information, but Grindr said at the time that an advertising partner could have been the source.
The stakes are high now with the prospect of a wider abortion ban in the US. What if state prosecutors start using phone data to root out abortion supporters or even women who order abortion pills online?
Capturing sensitive data is possible thanks to the wild and messy world of real-time bidding, a hugely popular approach to digital advertising and part of the life of companies like Google and Facebook. Here’s how it works: Every time a smartphone user opens an app or website that shows ads, their device shares data about that user to help show them targeted ads. The advertiser with the highest bid for the available ad space wins.
The data for each auction could go to dozens or even hundreds of companies. Google says it transmits data from US users to about 4,700 companies in total worldwide. Each “broadcast” – as they are called in the industry – typically shares data about a person’s location – including “hyperlocal” targeting, according to Google’s own pitch to advertisers – about individual characteristics and Browsing habits help advertising firms build user profiles. There is also a lengthy classification in the advertising industry that networks use to classify people, including sensitive labels such as “anxiety disorder” and “legal issues,” or even “adultery” and “abuse support.” Including, according to a public document published by the Advertising Networks Consortium that sets standards for the industry.
The complex and obscure nature of the billion-dollar online advertising business makes it difficult to know exactly what data Google is sharing about us. For what it’s worth, Google transmits less personal data about people than other smaller ad networks, according to Johnny Ryan, a senior council fellow who oversees the compilation of the latest data. But Google also makes up the largest chunk of broadcast data, he said.
The sheer size of the data that circulates each day is no fun fact: it underscores the reality that we are surrounded by tools that collect information to improve our lives, but which are later sent to the highest bidders. is sold to. Smart speakers, fitness trackers and augmented-reality glasses are just a few examples of the growing trend of ambient computing. The data collected by those devices could be exploited in ways we are not aware of. Last week, Vice reported that the San Francisco Police Department had sought footage from Cruz, a self-driving car company owned by General Motors Co., to help with the investigation. The SFPD denied that it intended to use the footage for ongoing surveillance.
Still, more data transmission means more potential for abuse. Even when the objective is as intuitive as advertised, ambient computing runs the risk of turning into ambient monitoring.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of “We Are Anonymous”.