your data gets broadcast 747 times a day
You open an app. There is a rectangle at the bottom of the screen that has not filled in yet. In the gap before it does, an ad exchange writes up a short file about you and slides it across a table to a room full of buyers. The file says which app you are in, what kind of phone you are holding, roughly where you are standing, and whatever your advertising profile has decided you are into. Then the exchange asks the room a question. Who wants this person, right now?
Google's documentation for its exchange gives the bidders somewhere between 80 milliseconds and one second to answer. Late bids do not count. The highest bid wins. Ads are priced per thousand impressions, so a single look at you can clear for a fraction of a cent. The winner shows you a mattress. The rectangle fills in. You never noticed the pause.
The bidders who lost still got the file. That is the part most people do not know.
That is how the system has to work. You cannot ask a company to bid on a person without describing the person, and you cannot take the description back once it has gone out. Every firm in the room received your app, your device, your location and your profile. One of them paid for the privilege of showing you a mattress. The rest got the same data for free, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the pipe to make them delete it.
In May 2022 the Irish Council for Civil Liberties put numbers on this. Using industry figures from a confidential source, Johnny Ryan's team counted how often the real-time bidding system broadcast a person's online activity and location. For the average American it was 747 times a day. For the average European, 376. Across the US and Europe together, 178 trillion times a year.
Colorado came out highest in the US at 987 broadcasts per person per day. Google alone allows 4,698 companies to receive these bid requests about people in the US. Microsoft said it might send them to 1,647. The report counted only Google-style exchanges and left out Facebook and Amazon, so the authors call their numbers a floor. The industry it describes is worth more than 117 billion dollars a year. The ICCL's title for the report was The Biggest Data Breach, and Ryan's line was that it repeats every day.
Google's answer was that it does not share personally identifiable information and that it sets industry-leading safeguards on how the data is used. Which is to say the file does not have your name on it. It has your device ID, your location, and your interests, and there are data brokers whose entire business is turning that back into a name.
I asked the question in 2013, before any of this had a report attached. attention deficit -- who stands to benefit? I had no idea the answer was 4,698 companies, bidding in a window shorter than a blink, on an item that did not know it was for sale. The same year I tweeted that your most precious asset is your attention and that you should spend it wisely. That was the counterweight, and it still is, but you can only spend wisely if you know the price, and nobody tells you the price. You went for under a penny. Somebody got a deal.
It is strange to be inventory. It is stranger to volunteer for it. I keep a note from 2025 arguing that a dating profile advertises a chance to get to know someone rather than the someone, and I believe that, and the year before I had tweeted a one-line listing for myself as a freak with no matches. Both are true. Everyone online is writing their own bid request, and the exchange never asked us to stop.
In 2024 I wrote a note called AIRPLANE MODE. Disable Instagram and delete the app. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, the ads, the junk notifications. It is a list of ways to stop being a lot on the block, and like every such list I have written it worked for about three weeks, because the auction does not only run in the exchange.
It runs in your head. Every time you unlock the phone, something bids for the next four seconds of you. Your mother, the group chat, the mattress, a stranger's vacation in Portugal, the news, the person who has not replied. The bids are silent and the auction is over before you have formed a thought, and you only ever see the winner. You call it what you felt like doing.
The losers do not leave. They keep the request. They will bid again at the next unlock, and the one after that, 747 times a day.
I have been asking since 2013 who the audience is and what the product is. The answer has not changed. The price has gone down.
The painting: Dirck van Baburen, The Procuress (1622), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Public domain.
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