Digital advertising exposes people’s data 376 times a day in Europe, a new study suggests.

The number grows even higher in the US, where a person has their online activity and location revealed as many as 747 times across a 24-hour period, claims the report.

According to Google, Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is a process in which digital advertising inventory is bought and sold.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), which published the research earlier this week, said that RTB tracks what people are looking at “no matter how private or sensitive” the content and records where they go. It also says that most adverts on websites and apps are placed using this method.

The organisation claims that, on a daily basis, RTB broadcasts this data to a multitude of companies so that they are able to profile consumers.

The study says that, in Germany alone, Google sends 19.6 million broadcasts about internet users’ behaviour every minute they are online.

It also suggests that both European and US internet user private data is sent to firms around the world “without any means of controlling what is then done with the data”.

It says that after the data is broadcast, there is no way of restricting its use. It claims that data brokers used it to profile Black Lives Matter protestors, while the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have used it for warrant-less phone tracking.

Despite controversy around the advertising method, last year Microsoft agreed to buy RTB company Xandr from AT&T.

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