About Time!: Bloomberg Wakes Up to the Dangers of Google’s Surveillance Capitalism

Corporate media juggernaut Bloomberg is finally waking up to the dangers of surveillance capitalism, the prevalent business model the Masters of the Universe, but practiced more aggressively and successfully by Google than any other player on today’s web.

Writing in a Bloomberg article titled: “Google Is Sharing Our Data at a Startling Scale” which was also published by the Washington Post, Parmy Olsen the troubling deluge of advertising enabled by Google’s real-time bidding business practice exposes us to the ad market an astonishing 747 times each day. And that is only from Google — it doesn’t include advertising powerhouse Facebook or up and comer Amazon.

It is hard for humans to conceptualize such numbers, even if machines calculate them comfortably everyday — but if the exhaust of our personal data could be seen in the same way pollution can, we’d be surrounded by an almost impenetrable haze that gets thicker the more we interact with our phones. Quantified another way: By way of online activity and location, a person in the U.S. is exposed 747 times each day to real-time bidding, according to the data. The council says its unnamed source has special access to a manager of an ad campaign run by Google. (The figure doesn’t include personal data transmitted by Meta Platform Inc.’s Facebook or Amazon.com Inc.’s ad networks, meaning the true measure of all broadcast data is probably much larger.)

Google freely admits that it sends the personal data of American users, like their location, to about 4,700 companies. It also enables the ad industry to build juicy profiles on consumers including tags like “anxiety disorders” and “abuse support.”

The data can go to dozens or even hundreds of companies for each auction. Google says it transmits the data of American users to about 4,700 companies in total across the world. Each “broadcast” — as they are called in the industry — typically shares data about a person’s location —including “hyperlocal” targeting, according to Google own pitch to advertisers — personal characteristics and browsing habits to help ad firms build user profiles. The ad industry also has a lengthy taxonomy that the networks use to categorize people, including sensitive labels like “anxiety disorders” and “legal issues,” or even “incest” and “abuse support,” according to a public document published by the ad network consortium that sets standards for the industry.

According to Bloomberg, the number of smart devices listening in to everything we do is pervasive. Perhaps if Bloomberg had been reading Breitbart Tech’s reporting over the past six years, they would have seen the problem before it got this bad.

The sheer size of data broadcast each day is not a fun fact: It underscores the reality that we are surrounded by devices that collect information, ostensibly to make our lives better but which is then sold to the highest bidder. Smart speakers, fitness trackers and augmented-reality glasses are just a few examples of the growing trend of ambient computing. The data collected by those devices can be exploited in ways we don’t know. Last week, Vice reported that the San Francisco Police Department had sought footage from General Motors Co.-owned Cruise, a self-driving car company, to help with investigative leads. The SFPD denied it wanted to use that footage for ongoing surveillance.

Breitbart News will continue to report on Google’s collection and sharing of users’ personal data.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com