Everybody—especially readers of Irreal—knows that our browsing habits and Web activities are being vacuumed up by the malignant Adtech industry but you probably have no idea of how out of control they are. Techcrunch has a terrifying and infuriating article on Oracle’s BlueKai and how they track what you’re doing on the Web.
If you’re like me you probably thought that meant they put some tracking cookies on your machine when you visit certain sites but it’s much more than that. BlueKai has a massive database and, of course, they lost control of the data and it leaked. Leaked billions of records. Here’s a couple of things they know:
- A German man placed a €10 bet with a prepaid credit card. The entry had his name, address, email address, and phone number.
- A person unsubscribed from a mailing list. The database entry showed the person was interested in a car dash-cam and even knew what model of iPhone he was using and that its iOS was out of date.
The trick BlueKai uses to gather their data is to drop a tracking cookie on your browser and also put a tracking pixel in the site’s HTML so that they can tie your identity to where you browse. This should be illegal but of course it isn’t. The Hey email service that I wrote about before, disables tracking pixels. It would be nice if the major browsers would follow their example.