“A WIRED investigation into the inner workings of Google’s advertising ecosystem reveals that a wealth of sensitive information on Americans is being openly served up to some of the world’s largest brands despite the company’s own rules against it,” Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra write over at Wired. “Experts say that when combined with other data, this information could be used to identify and target specific individuals. Display & Video 360 (DV360), one of the dominant marketing platforms offered by the search giant, is offering companies globally the option of targeting devices in the United States based on lists of internet users believed to suffer from chronic illnesses and financial distress, among other categories of personal data that are ostensibly banned under Google’s public policies. Other lists of American users accessible for a price across the platform raise serious national security concerns, experts say, as they reveal data brokers striving to isolate millions of mobile devices carried by government workers — from U.S. judges and military service members to executive agency staff and employees on Capitol Hill. First reviewed by WIRED, an internal spreadsheet obtained from a U.S.-based data broker shows the DV360 platform currently hosting hundreds if not thousands of restricted or otherwise sensitive ‘audience segments,’ each containing a large tranche of data that points to countless mobile devices and online profiles of people in the U.S. The segments are generated not by Google, but by DV360 customers who upload them to the system, where others can use them to target ads at specific audiences. The data — first obtained by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (I.C.C.L.), Ireland’s oldest independent human rights body — reveals segments targeting hundreds of millions of device users based exclusively on health conditions, from chronic pain and menopause to, among others, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension.” Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, “Google ad-tech users can target national security ‘decision makers’ and people with chronic diseases,” Wired.
