ICO report reveals real time buying puts your data at risk

guest · Aug 19, 2019

ICO report reveals real time buying puts your data at risk
August 16, 2019
https://jaxenter.com/rtb-privacy-risk-160864.html

A recent report by the ICO has revealed that real time buying (RTB) in the programmatic advertising industry does not abide by GDPR requirements. This raises serious concerns regarding user privacy and security, especially considering most users do not know what RTB is, let alone that it involves their data.

The ICO report identified multiple issues with RTB in regards to GDPR and PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations). The main issues they discovered are regarding consent, transparency, and the complexity of the bidding process and ad ecosystem.
Consent
Within RTB, users are not provided with clear, comprehensive information about where their data is going and what it will be used for, a requirement under GDPR and PECR. If companies fail to provide this information, users cannot give legitimate consent for their data to be used.
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guest · Dec 20, 2019

Adtech told to keep calm and fix its ‘lawfulness’ problem
December 20, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/20/adtech-told-to-keep-calm-and-fix-its-lawfulness-problem/

Six months after warning that the real-time bidding (RTB) component of programmatic online advertising is wildly out of control — i.e. in a breaking the law sense — the U.K.’s data protection watchdog has marked half a year’s regulatory inaction with a blog post that entreats the adtech industry to come up with a solution to an “industry problem.”
Casual readers of the ICO’s pre-Christmas message for European law-flouting adtech might be forgiven for thinking it looks a lot like the regulator telling the industry to “keep calm and carry on regulating yourselves.”

The societal stakes couldn’t be higher. Yet the ICO appears content to keep calm and let the adtech industry carry on — no enforcement, just biannual reminders of “concerns” about “lawfulness.”
To wit: “We have significant concerns about the lawfulness of the processing of special category data which we’ve seen in the industry, and the lack of explicit consent for that processing,” as McDougall admits in the post.

So what can the adtech industry expect the ICO to actually do if it continues to fail to embed a “privacy by design approach in its use of RTB” (another of the blog post’s big suggestions) — and therefore keeps on, er, breaking the law?
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Well, the ICO plans to make like a sponge over the “coming weeks,” [...] No rush, eh.

Regulator confuses blogging with enforcement https://t.co/0QJxyDT10X Next up perhaps @iconew will hold an adtech roundtable where they don't serve tea & biscuits
— Natasha (@riptari) December 20, 2019
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ICO: Adtech and the data protection debate – where next?

guest · Jan 22, 2020

Campaigners Threaten ICO with Legal Action for AdTech Failings
January 22, 2020
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/campaigners-threaten-ico-legal/

Campaigners are threatening to take the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to court for failing to enforce data protection laws in tackling what they see as widespread illegality in the adtech industry.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) responded to an update from the ICO last Friday detailing what action has been taken since the latter’s June 2019 report raised serious concerns about real-time bidding (RTB).
The ICO duly raised multiple concerns in its report claiming: the methods of obtaining informed consent from data subjects are often insufficient; privacy notices lack clarity; and that the scale of data profiling and sharing is “disproportionate, intrusive and unfair.”
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However, in an update last week, the ICO seemed to hold back from enforcing GDPR and other relevant laws, choosing instead to focus on positive steps taken by Google and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to act on its concerns.
That’s not good enough for the ORG’s executive director, Jim Killock, who filed an initial complaint with the ICO regarding RTB practices 16 months ago.

"Last year the ICO gave a deadline for an industry response to our complaints. Now the ICO is falling into the trap set by industry, of accepting incremental but minimal changes that fail to deliver individuals the control of their personal data that they are legally entitled to.”
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guest · Mar 10, 2020

Adtech giant Criteo is being investigated by France’s data watchdog
March 10, 2020
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/a...-being-investigated-by-frances-data-watchdog/

Adtech giant Criteo is under investigation by the French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, following a complaint filed by privacy rights campaign group Privacy International.
“I can confirm that the CNIL has opened up an investigation into Criteo. We are in the trial phase, so we can’t communicate at this stage,” a CNIL spokesperson told us.

Yesterday it said the French regulator has finally opened a probe of Criteo.
“CNIL’s confirmation that they are investigating Criteo is important and we warmly welcome it,” it said in the statement.
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The crux of the RTB complaints is that the process is inherently insecure since it entails the leaky broadcasting of people’s personal data with no way for it to be controlled once it’s out there vs GDPR’s requirement for personal data to be processed securely.

Commenting on the CNIL’s investigation of Criteo, Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent privacy researcher and consultant — whose research on the privacy implications of RTB predates all the aforementioned complaints — told us: “I am not surprised with the investigation as in Real-Time Bidding transparency and consent were always very problematic and at best non-obvious. I don’t know how retrospective consent could be reconciled.”

“My long views on Real-Time Bidding is that it was not a technology created with particular focus on security and privacy. [...]”
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Privacy International: CNIL launches investigation of Criteo following PI's complaint

Almost a year and a half ago we complained about seven companies to three data protection authorities in Europe. These companies, ranging from AdTech to data brokers and credit rating agencies, thrive on the collection, exploitation and processing of personal data. They profile and categorise people - without our knowledge and infringing multiple legal requirements.

CNIL’s confirmation that they are investigating Criteo is important and we warmly welcome it. The AdTech ecosystem is based on vast privacy infringements, exploiting people’s data on a daily basis.
Under GDPR, the CNIL has the power to investigate and then, depending on the results, consider an enforcement action.
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guest · Sep 28, 2020

Web sites shared over 100 trillion pieces of our personal data last year: time to stop real-time bidding’s blatant disregard of privacy
September 23, 2020
https://www.privateinternetaccess.c...l-time-biddings-blatant-disregard-of-privacy/

The problem of RTB, and how it goes against core requirements of the EU’s GDPR legislation, was first discussed here three years ago, with updates noting the serious implication for privacy.

The UK’s Information Commission Office published the preliminary results of its investigation into RTB (since paused because of Covid-19) last year, and they didn’t look good for Google. The Irish DPC has been very slow to take action. As a result, one of the people involved in the initial complaint, Johnny Ryan, has released new evidence of how serious the problem is: [...]
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Given this almost unimaginable scale of personal data that is being sent across the Internet every day, in a completely uncontrolled fashion, it is no wonder that online privacy is practically non-existent.
These RTB broadcasts provide so much cumulative data about anyone using the Internet for any length of time that extremely detailed profiles of our most intimate interests can be built up.

What’s depressing is that this is not a new revelation. Precisely these issues were raised in Privacy News Online’s first article about RTB three years ago.
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