I’m taking a class on data privacy at the moment, and it made me think it would be interesting to see exactly what kind of advertising data has been generated by services like Google \ YouTube \ Etc. Is there somewhere online that’s easy to punch in an advertising ID & find that sort of data, or is that something you’d have to request from advertisers themselves? (AdSense etc?) Or maybe do the service providers (mentioned before) store that data?
Forgive my ignorance - still learning about this stuff!
You would have to request that data, and only the EU really has rules that allow for that.
In the US, asking for this kind of information basically results in “We don’t care, you’re not getting that data.”
I expect there’s a price attached to this data in the US though? Which organization/business is already paying for this is the question.
Google is not about to sell this data to anyone, the data is the money maker. They sell ads that are targeted based on the data - if they sell the data, they automatically lose their edge.
They won’t sell it to competitors or to OP. They’ll happily sell it to the NSA.
Does this also apply to the UK? In the EU, do you simply make a GDPR request, or what?
We have an equivalent GDPR legislation that’s mostly the same except the Tories carved out a few exemptions for the police (of course they did). Requesting your data, I believe, is still a thing though, and tbh I think you may have been able to do this under the 1998 data protection act. I may be misremembering though as I mentally threw that knowledge in the bin once GDPR came around.
The data is for sale, so you should be able to buy it. Good luck buying only one person’s data though.
Also the data is anonymized.
Data researchers have shown that the data can be de-anonymized, but it won’t be trivial for OP to do
I work in an advertising-adjacent industry. My company doesn’t collect data ourselves, but we do purchase and use advertising data on behalf of our direct customers.
First off, there’s no single “advertising id” in use across the industry. Some companies make up their own, some companies don’t have one at all. Several companies just link by your email address.
You may be interested to know that the CPRA legislation in CA from 2023 has made it a legal requirement to allow customers to request that businesses:
a) disclose what data they have about you
b) allow you to delete your data
… and a few other things.
Technically, this only applies to CA residents, but (dis)proving residency is hard enough that most companies will just accept your request regardless of where you live.
If you poke around, you should be able to find a way to submit CPRA requests to any given advertising company to request to see your data.
This comes with a big caveat though - the Stalker Problem. What if some asshole goes to AdSense and says “My name is totally Jane Doe, what do you know about me? Recent addresses, especially.” … That gets into scary waters quick.
The compromise many places have landed on is to confirm what they know about a person, but not volunteer any extra info. E.g. “I’m Jane Doe - what do you know about me?” -> “We know about Jane Doe.” or “We know nothing about Jane Doe.” (and if you provide email addresses etc, those may be individually confirmed or denied.)
There’s a new framework of intermediaries popping up that will automatically submit your info for deletion across the industry, so if you sign up for one of those you can have your data regularly cleared.
Wow, super informative!! Thank you for such a detailed response! I’ll definitely be looking into the CPRA
