Security concerns prompted military officials to unilaterally stop advertisers from collecting data earlier this year, which raises the question: how far is too far when it comes to ad tracking?
Tracking has been a fact of the ad industry for decades, and the use of personal devices has seen this accelerate exponentially.
Recently, the level of data collection reached a dangerous point. The US military was forced to disabled ad trackers on a number of Windows devices belonging to personnel, with advertising IDs on military devices removed, Reuters reported.
Location data was previously being used to target American military forces in the Middle East, with various restrictions placed on devices used by personnel.
Senator Wyden told the publication the military’s efforts “have not been effective at neutralising this threat”.
Representative Pat Harrigan added that US enemies “should not be able to pull out a credit card and buy information that helps them track American troops”.
Advertising overreach
This illustrates a long-standing point of contention in advertising, with concern growing across the industry about the sheer volume of personal data, including location data, collected by the ad industry, and often sold to and from data brokers.
In the case of the US military, many are often ordered to surrender their devices over fears the data generated by their smartphone usage could be used to track their location or inadvertently reveal compromising information.
The tracking strategy in question in this incident is mobile advertising IDs (MAID). These are a small set of unique identifiers tied to a device, which can be used to track activity across mobile apps, as well as pinpoint an individual’s specific location.
Google has a version of this (AAID) and so does Apple (IDFA). Importantly, MAID can collect so much data on a user that it can create a detailed and accurate account of a person’s daily habits, movements, and characteristics.
A MAID itself is not a GPS tracker, explains Anna Larkina, web content and privacy analysis expert at Kaspersky: “Precise coordinates, wi-fi information, in-app purchases, and app-usage signals appear only when a given app has the relevant permissions or itself reports those events to partners.”
Surveillance-based advertising is a vast industry with incredibly sophisticated infrastructure. Extensive profiles are built on each user in order to turn user data into advertising profit at a staggering scale.
“In practice, many free apps with location access do attach GPS pings to a MAID, and ad requests routinely include IP addresses. What is not automatic is a complete log of every installed app, every purchase, every wi-fi network, or a full browsing history.”
Within the ad infrastructure is real-time bidding (RTB), which tracks what users are looking at and their live location. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties found on average, a person in the US has their online activity and location exposed 747 per day just by the RTB industry.
“The result is not a second-by-second broadcast of someone’s life, but it can still be a detailed, commercially traded map of movements and habits. Those profiles have been used for aggressive marketing and scams. They have also shown up in stalking, outing, and surveillance by buyers on a market that remains only lightly regulated in most jurisdictions,” explains Larkina.
The US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies even use this data for warrant-less phone tracking, illustrating just how intrusive the data collection can be.
The consequences
The result of the intense ad targeting is not inconsequential. Advertisers, platforms, and affiliates can build up extensive pictures of consumers – the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed just how much data brokers can access.
Cambridge Analytica itself claimed to hold as much as 5,000 data points on over 230 million US voters, which it used to build psychological profiles and target users with political advertising.
Research by DoubleVerify outlines the concerns that consumers have. It found two-fifths (40%) of UK audiences are using an ad blocker, and as much as 68% have opted out of cookie tracking.
Colette Spagnolo, vice president of integrated marketing and analytics at DoubleVerify says: “When it comes to privacy, UK consumers draw a clear line.
“While less than half say they use ad blockers, the majority have opted out of cookie tracking. They’re comfortable with advertising, but less comfortable with being tracked across the internet. That makes contextual relevance – showing ads that match the content and experience around them – critical.”
Across the pond, the data is even more damning. In the US and Canada, GumGum research found the majority (62%) of respondents feel “creeped out” by online tracking, with 40% describing the over-personalisation of ads as “unnerving”, and 27% calling it a “violation”.
Repairing advertising’s reputation
Consumers are quickly growing tired of the intense personalisation and targeting from advertisers and tech companies. USC Dornsife research revealed the average US consumer is shown as many as 5,000 ads per day compared to just 500 in the 1970s.
Going forward, almost 80% of respondents wanted more transparency in how their data is used in digital advertising.
Some agencies and advertisers are moving away from behavioural data in their targeting and are beginning to use contextual data instead.
Contextual targeting focuses on matching ads with content they think is relevant (for example, Proton in an article about cybersecurity).
Sinead Coogan Jobes, head of policy and public affairs at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK explains: “Contextual advertising matches ads to the content someone is reading or watching at that moment, so a running shoe ad might appear alongside a marathon training guide.
“Because it draws on the content itself and not on information about the individual, it can reach relevant audiences without relying on personal data.”
Although this might historically be a little clunky, recent technological developments mean that contextual advertising is much more accurate and can be incredibly effective at targeting audiences without breaching their privacy.
“Advances in AI have made contextual targeting considerably more sophisticated, and many advertisers find it performs well for certain types of campaigns, particularly for building awareness,” Coogan Jobes continues.
The success of contextual advertising gives audiences the privacy to browse the internet without being followed and continually targeted from site-to-site, but enables advertisers to have confidence their content is reaching the audiences they find most useful.
For advertisers, this is worth considering as regulatory powers or public backlash could soon force them to rethink intense tracking techniques and instead rely on less precise practices to preserve the industry.
