Online platform giants such as Google and Facebook adamantly advertise that they do not sell your personal data. But this is a technicality - your information is shared constantly, and tech companies are rewarded handsomely in return.
Over a decade after Google became the generic trademark synonymous for search engine, the Google brand adorns a whole suite of apps that can serve all parts of a person’s digital life. From Gmail to Maps to airline ticket booking, the big G has a finger in just about every online pie. But it is advertising that is Google’s real business model, which its wide reach of free apps feeds back into.
While Google Search and YouTube ads are obvious, Google ads run all across the web, often without any overt ties to the Alphabet subsidiary. Websites and platforms which want to display ads often use another service to source advertising.
Google Ads is one of many services which power this process, but it is by far the largest facilitator of third-party ads on the web. They occupy just under 22 percent of the market share, almost double that of its next competitor.
When you load a webpage, you’ll likely see that the ad spaces take a little longer to load than the rest of the content. In the second that the space is empty, Google has conducted an auction for that spot and delivered the ad from the winning bid to your device.
In this real-time bidding process, Google shows information about the ad space to thousands of companies. These companies have algorithms to evaluate whether they are interested in the spot and how much to bid. Google weights this bid with its own quality score for the ad (measuring relevance and click-through rate) to pick a winner.
But the information shared with these advertising companies actually has very little to do with the ad spot itself. Instead, the information is about you, the potential audience for the ad. Google collects information on you whenever you use one of its products and services - including data like geolocation, device ID and browsing history.
Google collects this data into an incredibly detailed profile of you. It contains specific details like age or gender, but also many broad insights that can be gleaned from your history and habits. Documents from web advertising industry standard-setters IAB Tech Lab demonstrate the kinds of labels in use.
These categories include religion, interests, which app you’re using, bank account ranges, a history of gambling or alcohol addiction, whether you have special needs kids, all the way down to your exact GPS coordinates. All this information is shared with prospective advertisers every time you load an ad.
Google’s list of authorised buyers who participate in auctions and see this data includes 4700 companies in the US and just shy of 1100 in the EU. All these companies have access to your personal details when looking at an ad, including a unique cookie ID which allows you to be identified across all ads you see.
Many of these authorised buyers are advertisers with data brokering businesses on the side, and many are in auctions specifically to collect data for resale. For example, US-based company Venntel harvests GPS coordinates from multiple data broadcasters like Google Ads for it to repackage into detailed histories of people’s movements - which it then sells on to both private parties and government agencies.
There are many platforms which are effectively ‘data broadcasters’. These include Facebook, Amazon and others you won’t have heard of, such as PubMatic. Microsoft recently acquired ad exchange Xandr, which broadcasts to 1600 companies.
So no, Google does not ‘sell’ your data. It broadcasts your data to numerous third parties as part of a service selling advertising. Which, really, is the narrowest of technical legal side steps. Google is rewarded handsomely for sharing your personal information, and an unknown amount of third parties harvest and stitch this all together to use for their own purposes.
It’s also worth remembering that Google can and does use its enormous influence to funnel more people into their own services - and thereby into the data collection pipeline for their real business of advertising. Just earlier this year (iol.co.za/technology/gadgets/the-apps-youll-lose-with-the-new-play-store-update-cf4e1f31-86c9-46f4-9915-92a636a0c7e0), Google’s change to the version of Android OS it maintains (which runs on over 70% of Android phones) barred apps from recording phone calls.
What at first seems like a move toward privacy reveals itself to be blatantly self-serving when you realise this does not apply to Google’s own Phone app - forcing anyone looking for this feature into giving Google another portal into their personal data.
IOL Tech