The Nation: EU vs. US or People vs. Billionaires? 

Filed by the Irish Council on Civil Liberties and the Washington, DC–based Electronic Privacy Information Center, the complaint takes direct aim at Google’s “Real Time Bidding” (RTB) system that dominates online advertising. 

RTB, the complaint shows, is blasting out data about people’s health conditions, debts, gambling habits, sexuality, or politics—including “extraordinarily sensitive” material about active US military personnel, national security leaders, or judges—risking blackmail and compromise. On average, Americans are passing 750 items of valuable data every day into the RTB system, and this is being made available “without any security” to anyone who will pay, including the governments of North Korea, China, or Russia. Google has known about these security flaws for at least a decade but did not fix them: RTB now contributes to a big chunk of its advertising revenues that likely exceeded $250 billion last year. 

Read more here.