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OMG. What a horrible world we live in (hear-me.social)

submitted 2 months ago by Jerry@hear-me.social to c/cybersecurity@fedia.io

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OMG. What a horrible world we live in

The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you’re viewing to the ad auction company.
The ad auction company packages all the information they can gather about you into a “bid request” and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers.
The bid request may contain personal information like your unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information. The information in bid requests is called “bidstream data” and can easily be linked to real people.
Advertisers use the personal information in each bid request, along with data profiles they’ve built about you over time, to decide whether to bid on ad space.
Advertisers, and their ad buying platforms, can store the personal data in the bid request regardless of whether or not they bid on ad space.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-fuel-surveillance-industry-heres-how

#CyberSecurity #Privacy

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[–] TheZorse@hear-me.social 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

@Jerry

It's not just ads. FreeCodeCamp has a good privacy policy and no ads that I've noticed, yet when I leave the site, multiple Stripe cookies follow me. I assume Stripe is a method to donate to the site, but I haven't looked at or clicked on anything payment-related.

It's possible that FreeCodeCamp don't even know this is happening. I read an article by someone who has his own website where he talks about discovering that Stripe was following his users around.