Mozfest 2019: The hidden face of online advertising

Karolina Iwańska
4 min readNov 12, 2019

We all see personal ads online — they’re so commonplace that we usually don’t spend much time wondering how they got here. We trust the advertising industry when it says targeted advertising is a win-win: users see relevant ads, advertisers reach the right audiences and publishers can pay for content. It’s only when we take a closer look at the inner workings of targeted advertising that we understand the implications: intimate details about our online routines are ‘broadcast’ to a tens if not hunderds of companies, over which we have no real control.

We looked at this hidden, darker face of online advertising during a Mozfest session Personal ads are everywhere… and so is your data. I co-run this session with Amy Shepherd from Open Rights Group. Here’s a short recap of what we discussed.

First, we asked participants about their attitudes towards targeted advertising. They found targeted advertising either too detailed (and creepy) or not relevant at all. It’s virtually impossible to opt out of targeted ads and information about why we see a specific ad is usually meaningless. Ads are taking over the actual content and it basically feels like the early, unruly days of the Internet. Not to mention that it takes ages for the page to load.

After we decided we were not particularly fond of how the online advertising ecosystem currently works, we took a closer look at how personal data flows within it.

We asked everyone to write down 5 things they had recently read about or looked for online, and then abruptly took their cards away from them without their consent (an offline version of how data for advertising purposes is collected). We distributed the cards in the group and asked each person to make some inferences about the person whose card they received. I expected that five entries from browsing history would be enough to draw more or less accurate general conclusions about a person but the amount of highly accurate inferences that participants were able to come up with in just 5 minutes exceeded my expectations. Now think about how much of this digital ‘debris’ each of us leaves behind on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis, and how detailed and intimate is the knowledge about our patterns that the ad industry has.

Three layers of your digital profile, Panoptykon Foundation

Our digital profile consists not only of things we share (such as photos, updates, likes or reactions) but also of information about our devices and how we use them — it’s called metadata and it reveals what time we log in and out, who we contact, what our real-time location is, and much much more. This ‘second layer’ makes it possible to draw quite accurate conclusions about us and our routines. These conclusions form the third layer of our digital profile, the largest of all three and the core of what advertisers are looking for.

After data is collected it’s time to match the right user to the right ad. I explained how the so-called real-time bidding works. RTB is an incredibly quick technical process which takes place while a website is being loaded. In literally less than a blink of an eye your personal data is broadcast from the website to the ad auction where hundreds of advertisers place bids, competing for your attention (aka the possibility to show you an ad).

How real-time bidding works, can you figure?

That’s the easy explanation. As you can tell from the confusing drawing I made while explaining this process, the reality is way more complex and involves many different actors each of which has access to information about you. This mass data leakage, inherent to how targeted advertising currently functions, is a topic for a separate article (please stay tuned).

The sheer complexity and the obvious insecurity of this ecosystem sparked a long discussion fueled by disbelief that it has not yet been deemed illegal. Well, a group of NGOs (including my home organisation Panoptykon) and other stakeholders are working on it.

A new vision for online advertising?

As the discussion so far has been mostly shocking and eye-opening (which was the intention), we wanted to finish off with something slightly more optimistic. In the light of everything we talked about and learned, we reflected on a positive vision for advertising. There were many brilliant ideas: from transparency (giving users full access to their digital profiles), through focus on contextual, rather than personal data-driven ads, to pleas for more creativity in the content of the ads itself.

If the topic of online advertising and how to make it more privacy-friendly is interesting to you, follow my Mozilla Pulse profile for regular updates.

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Karolina Iwańska

Mozilla EU Tech Policy Fellow working on policy around targeted advertising