Advertising surveillance: the best of my Tweets

Twitter is dying and I closed my account, but I posted my archives

Published by Pixel de Tracking on August 6, 2023

Cognitive dissonance

Better than Feedly, Twitter allowed me to discover fascinating people, experts in their field, with offbeat or incisive takes on current events. It was also an excellent amplifier for my writing on adtech and surveillance capitalism. But its abuses, increasingly glaring since Elon Musk's acquisition, got the better of me.

2 articles sum up my feelings on this social network very well:

The last straw that triggered the closure of my account? The renaming of Twitter to X, a detail in Elon Musk's cultural vandalism project. You can now find me on Mastodon, a federated social network, which belongs to no one and therefore cannot be controlled by a fascist, megalomaniac billionaire.

Having published a lot on Twitter, sometimes on topics that deserved a full article, I nevertheless wanted to be able to republish my tweets elsewhere. So I followed these 2 steps:

My tweets are therefore available here, with a search engine to find tweets on a specific theme, and this post to reference the tweets that I want to find easily.

Google

Credit where credit is due: let's start this collection of tweets with the creator of surveillance capitalism.

The godfather of adtech

I had already written an article on "Google's domination of advertising markets", the monopolistic nature of Google's adtech brick and advertising surveillance are closely linked:

Google Chrome, advertising agent

Browsers are generally called "User Agents", this is not the case for Chrome, Google's dominant browser:

You can delve deeper into the Chrome subject with 2 of my articles:

Google Analytics, the advertising Trojan horse

In its minimal configuration, Google Analytics should work without advertising surveillance, but it is not that simple:

Other Google tools

Google adtech, Chrome and Google Analytics are far from the only tools dedicated to better monitoring you:

Learn more about the subject by reading my article "Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon".

Facebook

Alias Meta, the worst of surveillance capitalism, a source of inspiration for Google and for all adtech.

Limitless data collection

In my article "With Facebook’s “Resilient Signals,” advertising surveillance evolves", I detailed how Facebook circumvented browser tracking protections. As with Google, abuse of dominant position and violation of your privacy go hand in hand, as I wrote in the article "Facebook and WhatsApp, the art of betraying you". Facebook is doing everything it can to capture more and more user data:

Partnerships with the whole world

2 interesting examples, but Facebook has interfaced its advertising ecosystem with all the tools that matter:

Violating the law, a specialty

Facebook mocks regulations and the CNIL:

Platform surveillance, via “Pixels” & “Conversion APIs”

To bypass your ad blockers and other browser protections, Facebook created its “Pixel” and its “Conversion API” (CAPI), inspiring other platforms:

I also talk about these data leaks in the article "Guerlain (LVMH): luxury and surveillance".

Apple

As my article states "Does Apple really protect you from advertising surveillance?", Apple is not perfect when it comes to privacy, but it is generally an ally in the face of surveillance from Google, Facebook and adtech.

A specific definition of “tracking”

Apple has put in place fairly effective mechanisms to protect you from advertising surveillance, which do not affect its own business, which has the gift of annoying adtech:

Apple loves your personal data

Some Apple practices are problematic:

Adtech

Alongside Google and Facebook, thousands of companies are “innovating”, often to better monitor you.

Adtech, one huge black box

Almost incomprehensible operations, a proliferation of intermediaries, data leaks and scandals: welcome to the wonderful world of adtech:

Identifying you to better monitor you

Adtech has talent for finding new tracking mechanisms:

Disguised tracking via CNAME aliases

Some adtech players endanger the security of your online accounts by pushing the use of a domain alias called CNAME, simply to bypass browser protections. Many French sites do not ask questions and follow these recommendations. Some examples:

The solution to this tracking? Firefox with uBlock Origin, and "NextDNS, my new favorite tracker and ad blocker".

Cookie banners, bane of the web

Rather than changing its business model, adtech prefers to ruin your user experience:

To go further, read "On the legality of IAB consent banners", an analysis of the consent banners offered by Sirdata.

Sirdata

Supplier of cookie banners, behavioral data and “consentless” solutions, Sirdata is an interesting company:

Legitimate interest, the biggest scam in adtech

The biggest scam in adtech? Claiming to have a “legitimate interest” (one of the legal bases of the GDPR) in monitoring you:

Positive initiatives

Advertising and respect for privacy are not irreconcilable:

Sites and Applications

This ad surveillance complex would not work if websites and apps refused to use it. But the advertising bonanza is often too tempting.

Abusive conditions of use

Many sites play with the regulations, or even free themselves from them:

To learn more, you can read "Decathlon, all-in on surveillance".

Personal data leaks

It's not just the conditions of use, these rarely correspond to the reality on the ground:

Covid and personal data leaks

Lots of fantasies in France about surveillance linked to TousAntiCovid (compared to the little media coverage on algorithmic video surveillance for example, with France at the forefront of the field as denounced by La Quadrature du Net), but I nevertheless looked at the TousAntiCovid app:

The hypocrisy of the environment

In the category “we like denouncing Google and Facebook, but forget to put our own house in order”:

The CNIL, a very frustrating ally

To defend yourself against advertising surveillance, there are regulations, embodied in France by the CNIL. It is well-intentioned, sometimes makes important decisions (against Google or Facebook), but acts too rarely and very slowly. Lack of resources or complacency with adtech? Probably a bit of both...

The CNIL and cookies

As the CNIL does not want to apply the law for information sites, abuses are widespread:

To learn more, read the following articles:

CNIL sanctions

The CNIL therefore sometimes sanctions Google and Facebook. We can regret the slowness of the procedures and the amounts, which are not very large compared to the revenue of these 2 companies, but these sanctions do eventually have an effect: