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EFF has long warned about the dangers of the “real-time bidding” (RTB) system powering nearly every ad you see online. A proposed class-action settlement with Google over their RTB system is a step in the right direction towards giving people more control over their data. Truly curbing the harms of RTB, however, will require stronger legislative protections.

What Is Real-Time Bidding?

RTB is the process by which most websites and apps auction off their ad space. Unfortunately, the milliseconds-long auctions that determine which ads you see also expose your personal information to thousands of companies a day. At a high-level, here’s how RTB works:

1. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you’re viewing to the ad tech company.
2. This ad tech company packages all the information they can gather about you into a “bid request” and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. 
3. The bid request may contain information like your unique advertising ID, your GPS coordinates, IP address, device details, inferred interests, demographic information, and the app or website you’re visiting. The information in bid requests is called “bidstream data” and typically includes identifiers that can be linked to real people. 
4. Advertisers use the personal information in each bid request, along with data profiles they’ve built about you over time, to decide whether to bid on the ad space. 
5. The highest bidder gets to display an ad for you, but advertisers (and the adtech companies they use to buy ads) can collect your bidstream data regardless of whether or not they bid on the ad space.   

Why Is Real-Time Bidding Harmful?

A key vulnerability of real-time bidding is that while only one advertiser wins the auction, all participants receive data about the person who would see their ad. As a result, anyone posing as an ad buyer can access a stream of sensitive data about billions of individuals a day. Data brokers have taken advantage of this vulnerability to harvest data at a staggering scale. Since bid requests contain individual identifiers, they can be tied together to create detailed profiles of people’s behavior over time.

Data brokers have sold bidstream data for a range of invasive purposes, including tracking union organizers and political protesters, outing gay priests, and conducting warrantless government surveillance. Several federal agencies, including ICE, CBP and the FBI, have purchased location data from a data broker whose sources likely include RTB. ICE recently requested information on “Ad Tech” tools it could use in investigations, further demonstrating RTB’s potential to facilitate surveillance. RTB also poses national security risks, as researchers have warned that it could allow foreign states to obtain compromising personal data about American defense personnel and political leaders.

The privacy harms of RTB are not just a matter of misuse by individual data brokers. RTB auctions broadcast torrents of personal data to thousands of companies, hundreds of times per day, with no oversight of how this information is ultimately used. Once your information is broadcast through RTB, it’s almost impossible to know who receives it or control how it’s used. 

Proposed Settlement with Google Is a Step in the Right Direction

As the dominant player in the online advertising industry, Google facilitates the majority of RTB auctions. Google has faced several class-action lawsuits for sharing users’ personal information with thousands of advertisers through RTB auctions without proper notice and consent. A recently proposed settlement to these lawsuits aims to give people more knowledge and control over how their information is shared in RTB auctions.

Under the proposed settlement, Google must create a new privacy setting (the “RTB Control”) that allows people to limit the data shared about them in RTB auctions. When the RTB Control is enabled, bid requests will not include identifying information like pseudonymous IDs (including mobile advertising IDs), IP addresses, and user agent details. The RTB Control should also prevent cookie matching, a method companies use to link their data profiles about a person to a corresponding bid request. Removing identifying information from bid requests makes it harder for data brokers and advertisers to create consumer profiles based on bidstream data. If the proposed settlement is approved, Google will have to inform all users about the new RTB Control via email. 

While this settlement would be a step in the right direction, it would still require users to actively opt out of their identifying information being shared through RTB. Those who do not change their default settings—research shows this is most people—will remain vulnerable to RTB’s massive daily data breach. Google broadcasting your personal data to thousands of companies each time you see an ad is an unacceptable and dangerous default. 

The impact of RTB Control is further limited by technical constraints on who can enable it. RTB Control will only work for devices and browsers where Google can verify users are signed in to their Google account, or for signed-out users on browsers that allow third-party cookies. People who don't sign in to a Google account or don't enable privacy-invasive third-party cookies cannot benefit from this protection. These limitations could easily be avoided by making RTB Control the default for everyone. If the settlement is approved, regulators and lawmakers should push Google to enable RTB Control by default.

The Real Solution: Ban Online Behavioral Advertising

Limiting the data exposed through RTB is important, but we also need legislative change to protect people from the online surveillance enabled and incentivized by targeted advertising. The lack of strong, comprehensive privacy law in the U.S. makes it difficult for individuals to know and control how companies use their personal information. Strong privacy legislation can make privacy the default, not something that individuals must fight for through hidden settings or additional privacy tools. EFF advocates for data privacy legislation with teeth and a ban on ad targeting based on online behavioral profiles, as it creates a financial incentive for companies to track our every move. Until then, you can limit the harms of RTB by using EFF’s Privacy Badger to block ads that track you, disabling your mobile advertising ID (see instructions for iPhone/Android), and keeping an eye out for Google’s RTB Control.