Real-Time Bidding Is a Surveillance Dream ⇥ wired.com

Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, of Wired, published a look at how third-party lists uploaded to Google DV360 allow targeting based on factors Google says its policies prohibit. It is more-or-less a story of Google’s failure to adequately moderate its platform, but it is vile to learn the kinds of segments these third-party advertisers are creating.

The article then moves into a discussion of the underlying technology of real-time bidding (RTB) that powers today’s ad markets, and this stood out to me:

“Even if Google were to change its practices and only initially broadcast RTB data to entities in the United States,” EPIC’s complaint says, the data would “inevitably” fall into foreign actors’ hands. “Google has no way to control what happens to the data that it broadcasts so freely,” it alleges. This was also the contention of the organization that develops technical standards for the advertising industry. Known as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the organization acknowledged in 2018 that there is “no technical way to limit the way data is used after the data is received by a vendor.”

Foreign actors and private surveillance firms have been caught routinely exploiting RTB systems by creating shell advertising companies in order to access bid-stream data: information on users broadcast between the demand and supply sides of an RTB auction. In 2022, Adalytics, a digital ad analysis firm, published a report alleging that Google was sharing RTB data with RuTarget, an ad-tech firm owned by Russia’s largest state bank; activity that Google says it ceased in response. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that, by operating its own demand-side platform, an Israeli surveillance company called Rayzone had gained direct access to Google’s RTB data.

I understand why this focuses on the implications of the digital advertising system for adversarial purposes. But an excerpt from Byron Tau’s book “Means of Control” was published — also in Wired — one year ago explaining how the United States also uses RTB signals for surveillance purposes — because of course it does. This is a steady flow of granular information all of us provide with basically no oversight. It is not something used only by distant and scary others.