Google geolocates us 376 times a day, alerts a study

The survey comes to us straight from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), and is described as “largest data breach ever recorded”. According to several public figures, but also certain confidential sources relating to the extent of the RTB (real-time bidding)the ICCL thus believes that behind the screen of our smartphone, Google and the other major tech players are able to geolocate us almost constantly, and that they do not hesitate to do so.

The RTB auctions our geolocation

Particularly cited in the Irish regulator’s investigation, RTB (real-time bidding, or real-time auctions) is a type of advertising that is based on the auctioning of broadcasting space. Concretely, when a user consults a web page with an advertising insert, his profile is automatically analyzed by various potential advertisers, who then have access to several pieces of information concerning him, and in particular his geolocation.

By crossing a number of data, the companies then engage in an auction, which will then determine which ad to display based on the user profile, and the price on the table. An operation that takes only a few hundred milliseconds estimates the CNILand which is now an integral part of our online browsing habits.

Google guilty, but not only

Unsurprisingly, the results put forward by the ICCL survey overwhelm the GAFAM, and especially Google. The web giant would be a regular at the auction, to the point of sharing 71 billion RTB geolocations in Europe each year. Reported on an individual scale, the observation is still impressive: on the old continent, our smartphone geolocates us on average 376 times a day. A worrying figure, but much lower than that recorded in the United States, where no GDPR guarantees the security of online data. On average, Uncle Sam receives 747 geolocation-related RTB requests every day, or just over once every two minutes.

According to the ICCL, these results are all the more worrying as they could be far from reality. The report’s figures indeed indicate that this is a “low estimate”, which does not include “RTB broadcasts from Facebook or Amazon”.

Although advertisers do not really know the identity of a person, this advertising and geographic tracking obviously raises questions. Especially since it is not insignificant: once crossed, all the data collected can have a significant impact on the Internet user, who is then more likely to click on a promotional offer related to his interests and his daily life.

In Europe, RTB advertisements are worrying, especially since this is not the first time that RTB has been singled out for privacy concerns. It remains to be seen whether the GDPR will decide to take action against the practice. The full text of the study is available here.