The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering new privacy rules. The ICCL & Open Markets & TACD (a forum of 75 NGOs) make a major submission showing the need for action. 

21 November 2022 -- ICCL, the Open Markets Institute, and the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue, a forum of 75 NGOs, have sent the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) a joint submission (Link) on the privacy, market, and security hazards of surveillance advertising, urging the agency to act against commercial surveillance and to define “Real-Time Bidding” (RTB) as an unfair and deceptive practice. 

The FTC is considering new privacy rules to protect Internet users against tracking. The ICCL/Open Markets/TACD submission lays out the harms of tracking-based online advertising and urges the FTC to develop rules that protect Internet users. 

Surveillance advertising destroys individual privacy. Advertising’s “Real-Time Bidding” (RTB) system broadcasts Americans GPS coordinates and what they are doing online 107 trillion times a year. RTB is the dominant technology of online advertising, and triggers almost every time you load a page on a website, or use an app. 

• This exposes people to significant risk with examples like predatory profiling of a suicidal gambling addict, county sheriffs buying live feeds of people’s locations, and data on victims of sexual abuse being made available to buy. 
• Every year criminals exploit tracking-based advertising systems to steal billions of dollars from businesses who unknowingly pay to show ads to bots. 
• Surveillance advertising also poses significant national security risks: Google and other RTB companies broadcast the locations of Americans – including sensitive personnel - to companies around the world including those in China and Russia. 

The tracking industry tries to claim commercial surveillance has benefits beyond their own bottom lines; that it supports publishers or sustains the open Internet for regular people. Instead, tech companies have siphoned an estimated $35-$69 billion away from newspapers and other publishers and businesses. 

ICCL Senior Fellow Dr Johnny Ryan wrote the submission. He said: “Surveillance based advertising hurts the internet and exposes us all to discrimination, manipulation, and to private and government surveillance. We urge the FTC to act to protect people”. 

Sandeep Vaheesan, Open Markets Institute Legal Director, said "Ad tech companies track our activities online and offline, facilitate illegal forms of discrimination, disseminate false and incendiary content widely, and siphon ad revenues from newspapers and other media that do not and cannot operate surveillance dragnets. We're glad that the FTC is looking to crack down on this business model". 

Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad of the Norwegian Consumer Council, a TACD member organisation, said "This is also of key interest to European consumers, and this is why US and European groups are a issuing a joint call to action on a business model that we believe are at fundamental odds with fundamental rights".

See the full report for more.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) is Ireland’s oldest independent human rights body. It has been at the forefront of every major rights advance in Irish society for over 40 years. We are a non-profit, independent of the Irish Government. Read more ›

The Open Markets Institute is a Washington, D.C.- based non-profit that works to address threats to democracy, individual liberties, and national security from today’s unprecedented levels of corporate concentration and monopoly power. Credited by the Financial Times as “driving the debate” around the resurgence of interest in antitrust, Open Markets uses research and journalism to expose the dangers of monopolization, identifies changes in policy and law to address them, and educates policymakers, academics, movement groups, and other influential stakeholders to re-establish the competitive markets that long formed the bedrock of American democracy. Read more ›

The Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) is a forum of US and EU consumer organisations which develops and agrees on joint consumer policy recommendations to the US government and European Union to promote the consumer interest in EU and US policy making. Read more ›