Sunday Tribune

Google doesn’t ‘sell’ your data but does broadcast it

JAMES BROWNING james.browning@inl.co.za

ONLINE platform giants such as Google and Facebook advertise that they do not sell your personal data. This is a technicality – your information is shared, and tech companies are rewarded handsomely in return.

More than a decade after Google became the generic trademark synonymous for search engine, the Google brand adorns a 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 across the web, often without overt ties to the Alphabet subsidiary. Websites and platforms that want to display ads often use another service to source advertising.

Google Ads is one of many services that power the process but it is by far the largest facilitator of third-party ads on the web. They occupy just under 22% of the market share, almost

double that of its next competitor.

When you load a webpage, you’ll probably see that the ad spaces take a little longer to load than the rest of the content. In the second 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. The companies have algorithms to

evaluate whether they are interested and how much to bid. Google weights this bid with its own quality score for the ad (measuring relevance and clickthrough rate) to pick a winner.

The information shared has little to do with the ad spot. 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 the data into a detailed profile of you. It contains details like age or gender, and many insights that can be gleaned from your history and habits.

The 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 GPS co-ordinates. The information is shared with prospective advertisers every time you load an ad.

Google’s list of authorised buyers who participate in auctions and see the data includes 4 700 companies in the US and just shy of 1 100 in the EU. The companies have access to your details when looking at an ad, including a cookie ID which allows you to be identified across all ads you see.

Many of the buyers are advertisers with data brokering businesses on the side, and many are in auctions to collect data for resale. For example, Us-company Venntel harvests GPS co-ordinates from data broadcasters like Google Ads for it to repackage into detailed histories of people’s movements – which it sells to private parties and government agencies.

There are many platforms that are effectively “data broadcasters”. These include Facebook, Amazon and others you wouldn’t have heard of. Microsoft recently acquired ad exchange Xandr, which broadcasts to 1 600 companies.

No, Google does not “sell” your data. It broadcasts your data to numerous third parties as part of a service selling advertising. Which 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 influence to funnel more people into its own services – and thereby into the data collection pipeline for its real business of advertising. Earlier this year, Google’s change to the version of Android OS it maintains (which runs on more than 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 Phone app, forcing anyone looking for this feature into giving Google another portal into their personal data.

BIZ TECH

en-za

2022-06-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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