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Europeans' Data Shared 376 Times Daily in Advertising Sales, Report Says

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 18 2022, @01:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the sharing-is-caring dept.
Digital Liberty

upstart writes:

Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales, report says:

The study, by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), found that the average European user's data is shared 376 times per day.

The figure rises to 747 times daily for US-based users, the report claims.

The revenue from digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.

The ICCL is currently engaged in legal action with the digital ad industry and the Data Protection Commission against what it describes as an epic data breach, arguing that nobody has ever specifically consented to this practice.

It includes information about the device the page is loading on, some details about where that device is, and other information such as previous websites visited and their subject matter.

[...] The report claims that:

  • data about US web users' habits are shared in advert sales processes 107 trillion times per year. European users' data is shared 71 billion times
  • Germany's individual internet users' data is shared once every minute that they are online, using a calculation based on averages

Tech reporter Parmy Olson, writing for Bloomberg, said: "If the exhaust of our personal data could be seen in the same way pollution can, we'd be surrounded by an almost impenetrable haze that gets thicker the more we interact with our phones."

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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @02:14PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @02:14PM (#1245929)

    I don't care if you know that I posted on SoylentNews or that I'm going to go to Amazon next, because I use an ad blocker and don't see your dumb advertisements.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:45PM (2 children)

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:45PM (#1245980)

      Hope you don't search for anything serious and medical related at the same time that you need a mortgage.

      Note that capitalism *requires* the banks to do everything they can to understand the risk they are taking on when they give you a loan.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @09:30PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @09:30PM (#1246055)

        Shirley, you mean _predatory_ capitalism. I don't see how this "we must find every single way in which we can fuck you over" is inherent to capitalism at all...

    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:47PM

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:47PM (#1245981)

      ps: hope that no one who has you in their contact list and uses FriendFace/TwitBrains/alia has a bad credit rating as well.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @02:27PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @02:27PM (#1245934)

    Sure adblock/noscript would work to some extend, but in the end the browser is giving the info. Even connecting to some point can give data that they can work with: user-agent, IP address, CSS hacks that reveal data, etc. What we need is some sort of tech that would block these things, masks them, or pollute the send data. But if you look at existing technologies that does some of these things, the web "breaks".

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @03:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @03:28PM (#1245954)

      With the sites that use Javascript for the sole reason of not letting users disable it, the solution is to do page demangling in an userscript instead, in Greasemonkey or a workalike, while keeping Javascript disabled for the site (as that does not affect userscripts).

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:56PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @04:56PM (#1245984)

    > digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.

    Please give me a big red button that removes all those "most internet services" that /need/ advertising, so I can go back to enjoying my pre-1993 Internets that was easily 50x more efficient and effective at global collaboration than it is today.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @06:39PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @06:39PM (#1246011)

      Trolling back then was much more entertaining. Nowadays what's considered trolling is just mean spiritedness and hate. Posting socially inappropriate things just for the sake of posting them is not clever, nor is it trolling.

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @07:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @07:13PM (#1246024)

        Fuck you, anti-troll discriminator. I hate you and whatever political party you are dumb enough to vote for.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @09:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @09:32PM (#1246057)

      Given the current bandwidth and internet speeds available, imagine how friggin' light-speed fast that must be without the burden of all the cruft...

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