Data brokers boast about almost all Internet users having highly detailed personal information

The owner of the data brokerage business recently released a creepy video where he boasts about the industry that can collect and analyze data on the habits of billions of people.

In 2019, data broker Epsilon was acquired by French advertising group Publyis Groupe. Then, earlier this month, Publish also acquired Lotame, another data and advertising company, and announced plans to integrate it with Epsilon's business. At the time, Publyis CEO Arthur Sadoun said the new company integration would allow his company to provide “large-scale personalized messages” to about 91% of Internet adult network users.

To convey this “personalized message” (i.e., advertising), Publyis must collect a large amount of information about the people it serves. In the newly released video, Sadoun breaks the information his company claims to be available. The video involves the software program Coreai, which shows how much companies can analyze and predict individual consumers’ habits and behaviors.

To prove this, Sadoun introduces the audience to “Lola”, a hypothetical young woman who represents the typical web user who Publyis now has data. “On the basic level, we know who she is, what she looks at, what she reads and who she lives with,” Sadon said. “Through the power of connected identity, we also know who she is following on social media, what she buys online and offline, where she buys, where she buys when she buys and more importantly, why she wants to buy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycse0vbh3vi

Things got worse. “We know Lola has two children, and her kids drink a lot of quality juice. We can see that the price of the Sku she bought has been steadily rising on the shelves of her local retailers. We can also see that Lola's revenue is not keeping up with inflation. With Coreai, we can predict that Lola has a high trading tendency that can continue to the private label.” Sadoun said this means that the algorithm arrested whether Lola might start buying cheaper juice brands. If this is the case with the software, Coreai Algo can automatically start showing Lola ads to those priced juice brands that are lowered, Sadoun said.

Poor Lola. The biggest problem is that it’s not just Lola being influenced by this all-encompassing company gaze – apparently, almost everyone is on the internet.

“Thanks to Coreai, we can do this with 91% of adults around the world,” the CEO brags. That's equivalent to nearly 4 billion people.

Lena Cohen, a technologist at the Electronic Border Foundation, said data brokers like Publyis gathered “as much information as possible” about web users. “The data brokerage industry is underregulated, opaque and dangerous because as you can see in the video, brokers have detailed information from billions of people, but we know relatively little about them,” Cohen said. “You don't know what data brokers have about you, who they sell it to, and what information are being used by the people who bought your data. There is real power/knowledge asymmetry.”

Cohen said the data brokerage industry clearly has no meaningful regulations that allow companies to operate without much transparency or supervision. “The United States needs a comprehensive federal privacy law, and I don't know how likely it is.”

Even through state-level privacy regulations (such as California Consumer Privacy Act), these cases often do not receive enough focus or resources to be effectively enforced. “Most government agencies don't have the resources to implement the scale they're broken,” Cohen said.

Cohen added that she believes that ads based on specific browsing activities of a single web user are online behavioral ads, which is illegal. “This is not the data that advertisers should have,” she said, noting that contextual ads (based on content on a specific page) should be valid for companies. Cohen said that prohibiting behavioral advertising would “funally change the economic incentives that online participants are constantly monitoring” for online users and share their data with brokers.