STOP THE DATA BROKERS AND BUYERS – REAL TIME BIDDING (RTB)
AI – MODELS
TO UNCOVER THE HIDDEN DATA TRADE:
GLOBAL EFFORT TO EXPOSE DATA BROKERS AND THOSE WHO ARE WILLING TO BUY AND PROFITTIER FROM OUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
We Are Not Products – We Are Human Beings
Across the European Union, the legal principles protecting personal data are already well established. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the ePrivacy Directive, together with national data protection, consumer protection and human rights laws, require that personal information whether provided directly by a customer or collected through other lawful means must be collected, processed, stored, shared and used only within a clear legal, ethical and human rights framework.
Where organisations or individuals secretly collect, exploit, commercially sell or knowingly purchase personal information without a lawful basis, these existing laws already provide the powers to investigate, enforce and impose significant penalties where breaches can be established.
Artificial Intelligence will now become a powerful investigative tool to help identify and expose evidence of potential breaches by tracing data flows, analysing commercial relationships and revealing the networks of thoes involved in collecting, selling, buying and profiting from our personal information.
If stealing someone’s property is a crime, unlawfully taking and exploiting someone’s identity must be treated with the same seriousness.
We have been told that constant tracking is “innovation”. We have been told that harvesting information from our phones, our cars, our televisions, our homes and our daily activities is simply the modern way of doing business. This has gone far beyond acceptable business practice.
The public never agreed to become a product.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks:
“I would like hundreds of unknown companies to build a profile about me today.”
Nobody wants their personal information passed between organisations they have never heard of. Nobody wants their vehicle, television, phone or connected devices quietly becoming sources of commercial intelligence about their lives.
Yet this is the reality people are faced with.
The argument that people “consented” because they clicked a button hidden in some cookie or inside pages of complicated legal wording is increasingly being challenged and rejected.
WITHOUT BUYERS THERE, IS NO MARKET
The public debate has focused on data brokers, but they are only one part of the marketplace. Every data broker depends on people willing to buy, and profit from our personal information.
Real-time bidding (RTB)
Have you hear of this?
A system where advertisers compete in an automated auction in real time to show an ad to a specific person right when an ad impression is available.
This goes on in real time at the back end of search engines on your computer or phone without your knowledge.
To have an auction you must have something to sell. Our private information is the product on sale.
The information is sent to bidders whether they win the bid or not.
But if they received the personal data before the auction was decided, what did they do with it after losing, how long did they retain it, and were they legally entitled to receive and process it in the first place?
Organisations processing personal data must be able to identify a lawful basis for doing so and comply with the GDPR’s transparency requirements. Where consent is relied upon, that consent must be informed, specific, freely given and unambiguous.
If an individual has never been properly informed that their personal data may be collected, disclosed to advertising participants in online auctions, and processed within a real-time bidding system, the lawfulness of that processing is a fundamental issue.
The scale of the potential disclosure is equally concerning: a person could browse several products online and, within only a few minutes, information relating to their activity could potentially be transmitted through the advertising ecosystem to hundreds or even thousands of third-party companies.
What is the role of the search engines in this equation. This is a business model and the search engine operates with advertising partners.
How can someone meaningfully consent to something they were never told was happening?
This is a legitimate GDPR question.
Search engine/website → Ad exchange/advertising intermediary → Advertiser, back to search engine. Every participant is automatically legally liable for the information it is providing to all other parties.
AI AND THE AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY IS COMING
Privacy violations should no longer be treated as minor regulatory matters or simply a cost of doing business. As AI technology advances, so will the ability to detect, trace and expose the misuse, exploitation and unauthorised trading of personal information. Artificial intelligence will increasingly enable the monitoring of data flows, identification of suspicious practices and tracing of information shared between search engines, advertising intermediaries and other third parties, bringing much-needed transparency to an industry that has operated for too long beyond public scrutiny.
Watch Out For The Campaign Starting Soon
I have acquired an initial database containing details of more than 1,000 data brokers, which will be need to be systematically verified, analysed and reviewed as part of this investigation and campaign.
Read about “Chat Control Law”
