Cianan Brennan: Your browsing behaviour informs targeted advertising — but is it legal?

Cianan Brennan looks at the growing phenomenon of online real-time bidding and what it means for our personal information

Your search history informs online profiling, which results in targeted advertising. File picture.

On Monday, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) received a submission from Dr Johnny Ryan, a recent recruit to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) regarding a complaint he had made exactly two years earlier, concerning the online advertising process of real time bidding (RTB).

Dr Ryan asserted that RTB represents “the biggest data breach ever recorded” in the context of GDPR, and questioned why, some 24 months after he first raised the issue with the DPC, little progress had been made.