Our personal data is shared hundreds of times a day. a report The Irish Council on Civil Liberties (ICCL) titled “ Biggest data breach “,” advertisers identifies a practice called RTB or Bidding in real time (Bidding in real time). It determines which advertisement displayed in web pages or Applications.

When you load a page or application that contains ads, your profile, including Your geographical location The displayed content is sent to the ad server. Different advertisers review this information, share it with other data they already have, and then submit bids. It is he who wins advertisement an offer. The whole process is done automatically in a few hundred thousandths of a second.

Google and Microsoft are leading the culprits

On average, European Internet user data is exposed 376 times a day, or more specifically 340 times a day for France. In the US, the number is much higher: American Internet users see their data being shared an average of 747 times a day. Among specific advertisers, Google comes in first with 21%. broadcast RTB. The report also cites Microsoft (Xandr) and other major companies that are less known to the general public (Index Exchange, PubMatic, Magnite…).

Personal information is shared with various advertisers. Microsoft He notes, for example, that his Xandr platform can send data to 1,647 other companies. Although it is meant to be anonymous, once released, this data can be reused for other purposes. In the United States, information from RTB has been used, among other things, to characterize protesters from a movement Black Lives Matter Movementor even a college priest picnic gay who have used the Grindr app. It remains to be seen whether this practice will continue in Europe. The Belgian data protection authority is expected to decide soon whether the RTB is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which could have consequences across the European Union.