Digital advertising is everywhere nowadays. However, they are actually a giant risk to privacy and now, safety. To be successful, digital advertising depends on showing you highly targeted advertisements, which ultimately incentivizes them to build up profiles about you via your browsing history, search queries, location, demographics, and even behavioral patterns. More data about you means they can find ads that you’re more likely to be influenced by.

Data is collected via cookies and tracking pixels, which are invisible images that websites include to correlate an ad click with a user actually buying something. For example, in my post about Monarch Money and ad networks, the company embeds tracking images from TikTok and Reddit in their secure portal meaning that TikTok would know that the given user cares about finances. Now they can target usersr with more relevant ads.

Now you go to a restaurant and store that ask you if you want to sign up for a rewards program. If you come back 6 times, your 7th coffee is free! What a deal. Just enter your phone number and you’re in. Well, usually those programs are implemented by tech companies like Square point-of-sale systems who can then aggregate and use that to increase their surveillance.

What are data brokers?

Data brokers are the name for a company which makes money by finding information about people from as many different sources they can, aggregating it up to a specific person, then selling that package of information to other companies. For example, a data broker could scrape your local county’s property records which contains addresses, owner names, sale dates, and property taxes. That starts to associate names with income and financial statuses.

Court records can give a list of parking tickets and other information that’s relevant for background checks, a car insurance company looking to see how many tickets you have, or a prospective employer rescinding an offer.

Data breaches are hitting every company now accidentally leaking your personal information to the dark web because there’s no financial penalties for it. Nothing stops a data broker from finding these dumps and adding it to their package of information about you.

Where does the government come in?

The United States’ fourth amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is generally interpreted to mean that the government has to have a warrant to “search” and monitor citizens and hopefully

However, if a company comes along and sells information about people, it’s not considered a search. The government can go to a data broker and say I’d like to buy everything you have and now they can do anything with that data. A hostile government could use that to track down people that disagree with them.

Block Ads

Why?

the FBI recommends it
ads are used as part of data brokers to build up shadow profiles
the government can buy access to this

Easy - Use Firefox with uBlock Origin If you’re using Google Chrome, I recommend switching to Mozilla Firefox because Google Chrome syncs your browsing history to their servers Evident here. This data can be used to build

Easy - Disable advertising identifier on iOS and Android Android and iOS phones have a built in advertising ID that is unique to your phone that doesn’t change. This identifier is used by ad networks to uniquely associate data to your phone, which by extension, provides information on you. Regularly rotating and/or deleting this id means that those ad networks can’t build this profile.

This will mean that advertisements will become less personalized to you, but this is good. On Android, go to Settings, search for advertising id, To do this, follow the steps here

Medium - Use DNS-based ad blocking Why? DNS-based ad-blocking is complementary to browser ad-block extensions. When setup, it can block some (but not all) ads in other apps on your phone and across your entire network.

How? On your phone? Try using NextDNS. Setup an account and enable any privacy filters you want. I like:

Blocklists - NextDNS Ads & Trackers Blacklist
Native Tracking Protection
Block Disguised Third Party Trackers

Hard - Self-host a DNS-based ad-blocker If you’re technically skilled, then you should consider running a Pi-Hole or Adguard DNS server at your home network. You’ll need a computer that always runs, such as a raspberry pi or other efficient computer, and will configure your DHCP server to hand out your DNS filter computer to all devices on the network. For more info, see the Adguard guide.

Data Brokers

What can you do about data brokers? The US doesn’t have a nation-wide privacy law, like GDPR, to control how companies store or process your data. Your only option is to opt-out or request deletion of your data to ask them to delete what they know about you. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of data brokers and it’s impractical to be able to find every one and opt out. Targeting the biggest ones is better than nothing

Of course, capitalism means you can pay somebody to remove yourself from data brokers. I personally use DeleteMe (or non-affiliate.)

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-information/services-that-delete-data-from-people-search-sites-review-a2705843415/

Unfortunately, opting out of data brokers is not a big win because eventually your data will come back and you have to opt out again.

Some states in the US have privacy laws like GDPR for residents of those states. For example, in California, you can request deletion of your data from many brokers all at once at the CA DROP site. See more states here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the unchecked power of digital advertising and data brokers poses a threat to our privacy and safety. By collecting vast amounts of personal data, these entities create detailed profiles that can be exploited not only for targeted ads but also by malicious actors or even hostile governments. The ability of data brokers to aggregate and sell sensitive information, often without meaningful regulation, works around limitations on the US Constitution to undermine rights.

While opting out of data brokers and using tools like ad blockers can help mitigate some of these risks, the problem is systemic. Until stronger privacy laws are enacted and enforced, you must remain vigilant and proactive in safeguarding their personal information. By taking steps to block ads, disable tracking identifiers, and remove your data from broker databases, you can reclaim some control over your digital life. Privacy is not just a right—it’s a necessity in our increasingly data-driven world.

References

Comments

To give feedback, send an email to adam [at] this website url.

Donate

If you've found these posts helpful and would like to support this work directly, your contribution would be appreciated and enable me to dedicate more time to creating future posts. Thank you for joining me!