EU regulator announced the launch of the GDPR survey to Google Inc.
The EU has officially announced a GDPR survey to Google. The security and privacy investigation is under the responsibility of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. This is also the first time Google has had a positive confrontation with the EU’s major privacy regulators, and the main reason for the investigation is the real-time bidding mechanism for Google ads.
The main content of this survey is that Google’s advertising real-time bidding system leaks user privacy, that is, it cannot protect the user’s private information from unauthorized access. The real-time bidding system is the mainstream and most commonly used system in the advertising industry. It uses advanced technology to push users with more relevant advertising content. For example, when a user visits a webpage, Google sends information such as the user’s interests, webpage content, etc. to multiple ad networks for ad matching. Each ad network will immediately make a price budget when it matches the user, and Google will select the ad network with the highest bid and push its ad to the user. In this session, Google must send previously or now collected information to the ad network, which is to share the user’s private information with the ad network.
After the Irish Data Protection Commissioner announced the news, Google official immediately issued a statement in which Google denied that there was a violation of the real-time ad auction system. Google said the company will fully participate in the investigation of regulators and hopes to have the opportunity to clarify the protection rules of the Google advertising real-time bidding system in the EU. Google also said that the ad network using the company’s real-time bidding system must comply with strict policies and standards to ensure that users’ private information is not abused.
As mentioned above, real-time bidding advertising is a widely used technology in the advertising industry, but this technology also clearly has user data sharing. In addition to Google’s own customer advertising, Google’s advertising system works with thousands of advertisers around the world to resell the remaining traffic in real-time auctions. And every time the real-time bidding Google may share the user’s information to more than ten advertising networks, this is the focus of the EU’s investigation into Google.
If the final result of the investigation is Google’s behavior violations, then Google will be heavily penalized by the EU and must also change the real-time bidding system. In the end, other advertising networks must also change the real-time bidding system and may even make this form of advertising no longer exist, so it has a huge impact on the advertising industry.
Via: CNBC
