Image: Cathryn Virginia/Motherboard
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
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"It matters," Johnny Ryan, a fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and formerly chief policy officer of the Brave web browser, told Motherboard in an online chat referring to the answer to these basic questions. Ryan has followed the bidstream market extensively, testifying to regulators and lawmakers about the industry. "Data about (almost) everyone online, where they are and where they have been, what they are reading, watching, and listening to, is being broadcast to thousands of companies without any control at all," Ryan added.Before an advertisement is shown inside an app or a web browser, a process called real-time bidding (RTB) takes place, where different companies bid to have their own ad displayed. As participants in that process, companies obtain sensitive data on the user, even if the company ultimately does not win the ad placement. The result is that a swath of companies obtain the generated bidstream data, with some even using it explicitly for surveillance. Venntel, a government contractor that sells location data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, uses bidstream data, Motherboard previously reported.Do you have bidstream data you are willing to share with Motherboard? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
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