Google has been accused of sending the data on American citizens to China, in a new complaint by privacy groups to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The complaint, brought by Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), is the first to be brought under the US’s new data-security laws, and takes aim at Google’s real-time bidding system for online advertising.
The groups have urged the commission to investigate Google’s real-time bidding data, claiming the company is sending large quantities of sensitive data about Americans to China and other foreign adversaries.
Filed under the new Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, the complaint alleges that Google has known for a decade that the technology broadcasts sensitive data without any security, and that chief executive Sundar Pichai allegedly failed to act on in-house calls to reform the system, citing internal Google communications.
Is TikTok’s US shutdown any more than a game of musical chairs among Chinese apps?
Don’t leave PRSI benefits on the table - they can save you thousands of euro
Striving for net zero will cost less than we thought, but it will not be plain sailing
For Avant Money CEO Niall Corbett it’s all about balance - ‘We have to lend money to make money.’
It said the system collects personally identifiable sensitive data about people in the United States from other businesses, potentially revealing their employment with the military and intelligence community, locations, political views, sexuality, ethnicity and online behaviour. That data could be accessible to foreign adversary countries, both directly and indirectly, the complaint alleges.
“We can now be certain Google knew about the security flaw in its advertising system for at least a decade. Despite this, it continued to vent sensitive data, betraying America and her allies,” said Dr Johnny Ryan, director of Enforce. “The FTC must act to end Google’s security crisis.”
Google’s advertising is worth more than $230 billion (€223.8 billion), with a sizeable proportion of that revenue accounted for by real-time bidding. The system operates on 33.7 million websites, 92 per cent of Android apps and 77 per cent of iOS apps.
Epic’s senior counsel Sara Geoghegan called on the FTC to take action, saying Americans’ data was being exposed to “foreign adversaries, undermining democracy and threatening our national security”.
[ EU to review investigations into Apple, Google and Meta as US pressure mountsOpens in new window ]
Google pushed back against the claim, saying it was “wrong” and based on “a flawed understanding” of how Google’s digital advertising technology works.
“Google has not shared data with bidders in Russia nor conducted any real-time bidding there since 2022. Furthermore, since last year, we implemented significant restrictions for entities based in or connected to China. This means we never share data tied to a specific user in the US for bid requests to those known entities,” a spokesperson for Google said.
“Google also has the strictest restrictions in the industry on the types of data we share in real-time bidding, and Google never sells a user’s data. We do not share precise location or sensitive personal data with any real-time bidding buyers and our policies prohibit any effort to build profiles on individuals based on sensitive data inferences.”
The complaint comes only days after the FTC published a final order in a previous case dealing with real-time bidding advertising exchanges. The agency banned tech company Mobilewalla from collecting consumer data from such exchanges for purposes other than participating in those auctions.
- Sign up for the Business Today newsletter and get the latest business news and commentary in your inbox every weekday morning
- Opt in to Business push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our Inside Business podcast is published weekly – Find the latest episode here
