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Irelands data watchdog slammed for letting adtech carry on biggest breach of all time

A dossier of evidence detailing how the online ad-targeting industry profiles internet users intimate characteristics without their knowledge or consent has been published today by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties , piling more pressure on the countrys data watchdog to take enforcement action over what complainants contend is the biggest data breach of all time.

Under EU data protection law, personal information that relates to highly sensitive and intimate topics such as health, sexuality and politics is whats known as special category personal data. Processing this type of information generally requires explicit consent from users with only very narrow exceptions, such as for protecting the vital interests of the data subjects .

So its hard to see how the current practices of the targeted ad industry can possibly be compliant with EU law, in spite of the massive scale on which internet users data is being processed.

In the report, the ICCL estimates that just three ad exchanges have made around 113.9 trillion RTB broadcasts in the past year.

Googles RTB system now sends peoples private data to more companies, and from more websites than when the DPC was notified two years ago, it writes. A single ad exchange using the IAB RTB system now sends 120 billion RTB broadcasts in a day, an increase of 140% over two years ago when the DPC was notified.

However in a follow-up to Doyles remarks, Ryan told TechCrunch he has no idea what the DPC is referring to when it mentions a full update. On next steps he said the regulator informed him it will produce a document setting out what it believes the issues are within four weeks of its letter, dated September 15.

In its case, after months of regulatory inaction, the ICO announced earlier this year that it had paused its investigation into the industrys processing of internet users personal data owing to disruption to businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Original article
Author: Natasha Lomas

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Natasha Lomas has recently written 6 articles on similar topics including :
  1. "The coronavirus is proving to have an unexpected upside for the adtech industry". (May 7, 2020)
  2. "A study of tracking cookies running on government and public sector health websites in the European Union has found commercial adtech to be operating pervasively even in what should be core not-for-profit corners of the Internet". (March 18, 2019)
  3. "It’s a year since Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force and leaky adtech is now facing privacy complaints in four more European Union markets". (May 20, 2019)
  4. "The latestreport to warn that surveillance capitalism is out of control and free digital services can in fact be very costly to peoples privacy and rights comes courtesy of the Norwegian Consumer Council which has published an analysis of how popular apps are s". (January 14, 2020)
  5. "Apples CEO Tim Cook has urged Europe to step up privacy enforcement in a keynote speech to the CPDP conference today echoing many of the points he made in Brussels in person two years ago when he hit out at the data industrial complex underpinning the adtech industry&#8". (January 28, 2021)
  6. "Twitter users have to wait to longer to find out what penalties, if any, the platform faces under the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for a data breach that dates back around two years". (August 20, 2020)
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