this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
58 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
32442 readers
695 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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