ICCL publishes report claiming RTB is ‘biggest data breach ever recorded’

Article summary

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has published a report on Real-Time Bidding data broadcasts in Europe and the US. It states that RTB, which tracks what users are looking at online and broadcasts this data to companies which use that data to profile the users of websites and apps, is the ‘biggest data breach ever recorded’ as it tracks people and their real-world location 178 trillion times every year in Europe and the US. The report also found that, on average, a person in the US has their online activity and location exposed 747 times each day, while in Europe, it is on average 376 times a day. The ICCL also notes that Google allows 4,698 companies to receive RTB data about people located in the US, and that the industry generated over $117bn across the US and Europe in 2021.