Konrad Kollnig
This document is highly work-in-progress, and I’d appreciate to hear from you. Contact me at @KKollnig or blog@kollnig.net, or leave a comment below.
Big Tech amass personal data at an unprecedented scale. This has unsettling consequences for individual privacy.
At the same time, Big Tech have a quasi-monopoly over digital services. They attract the majority of web traffic. This potentially restricts digital innovation.
Last month, in January 2020, the Norwegian Consumer Council, an NGO, published a report on collection and sharing of personal data in popular apps. The reassuring title: “Out of Control: How Consumers Are Exploited by the Online Advertising Industry”.
On 186 pages, the researchers analysed the data practices of 10 popular Android apps. Amongst those apps: a children’s app, a period tracker, and various dating apps.
What they found was a blatant disregard for governing data protection legislation, notably the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
An article on real-time bidding and ad exchanges
On average, a person sees over 1 700 online ads per month. A significant proportion of these ads are disseminated using so-called real-time bidding (RTB). Whilst the entire online advertising market has a size of 240bn USD, RTB only attracted 5bn USD in spending (1.8%) in 2018. However, RTB is mainly used to sell low-quality ads on otherwise unused desktop and mobile display space. As a result, the proportion of RTB amongst the overall number of online ads may well be higher than 1.8%. Unfortunately, there are no figures readily available, with RTB being a rather new technology. Spread and novelty of RTB motivate a closer look.
Die Untere Ruhrtalbahn ist eine ehemalige Eisenbahnstrecke, die den Bahnhof der Stadt Kettwig (seit 1975 Stadtteil von Essen) mit dem Bahnhof Mülheim-Styrum verband. Die Bahnstrecke wurde 1876 in Betrieb genommen und umfasste eine Länge von 14,7km (1435 mm Normalspur) bis zur Stilllegung in den 1970er Jahren.
This has been one of the darkest weeks of my time in the UK. I was there in 2016, around the time of the referendum, studying in Edinburgh under the EU exchange programme Erasmus.
I met Connor, with roots all over the UK, and my epitome for European friendship. Will others be able to have similar, rewarding experiences, and study within a Europe without borders? There seemed to be still hope.