ICCL report on the scale of RealTime Bidding data broadcast in the US and Europe

It's been many years since I worked in adtech, and in general I find a lot of the industry repulsive but the summary here seems a bit inflammatory and sensationalist.

"4,698 companies are allowed by Google to receive RTB data about people in the U.S." - At least when I worked on it, what Google tells you about a given ad slot and user is thoroughly stripped of identifying information. It's fairly severely anonymized and abstracted down to fairly large categories. (Other players in the marketplace behaved worse than Google, though.)

FWIW I don't think the ad tech market is a social good, but I think this is making it sound like Google and other RTB players are out there sending advertisers your PII and browsing history but that's simply not the case. Most of what they're sending is very abstract categories.

I'm saying this because I think the advertising market is a legitimate target for criticism, but that criticism should be honest or it will miss its mark.