Your Phone, Tablet, and TV are Communicating. You Just Can’t Hear it.
We’ve all had this experience: You search for a new pair of shoes on Amazon, and almost instantly, advertisements for those shoes are dominating your Facebook.
It’s a common occurrence in today’s highly tracked, highly targeted world of advertising.
However, until now, your online activity across devices has not been connected.
For advertisers, this is a big problem, because although they know what you may be looking for on your laptop, they don’t know what you’ve been searching for on your phone or watching on your TV, making it harder for them to get the full picture of your identity.
“Cross-device tracking” is changing this, as companies are developing ways to track your online whereabouts across multiple devices, from your TV, to your phone, to your laptop.
The practice has caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which held a workshop November 16 to explore issues surrounding cross-device tracking.
“As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behaviors that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them,” wrote the Center for Democracy and Technology in comments submitted to the FTC before the workshop. “Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person.”
How does cross-device tracking work? That’s where things get interesting.
According to the CDT letter, cross-device tracking can happen through the use of inaudible, high frequency sounds that allow devices in close proximity to link without the user’s knowledge. The industry leader of the audio technology is SilverPush.
The letter states:
“When a user encounters a SilverPush advertiser on the web, the advertiser drops a cookie on the computer while also playing an ultrasonic audio through the use of the speakers on the computer or device. The inaudible code is recognized and received on the other smart device by the software development kit installed on it. SilverPush also embeds audio beacon signals into TV commercials which are “picked up silently by an app installed on a [device] (unknown to the user).” The audio beacon enables companies like SilverPush to know which ads the user saw, how long the user watched the ad before changing the channel, which kind of smart devices the individual uses, along with other information that adds to the profile of each user that is linked across devices.”
There are various concerns about this type of data collection, particularly the fact that “users are often unaware of the wealth and detail of information that is being collected about their online and offline activities and the significant privacy invasions that result,” wrote the CDT.
The letter highlights a possible scenario of this technology revealing highly sensitive information:
“For example, a company could see that a user searched for sexually transmitted disease (STD) symptoms on her personal computer, looked up directions to a Planned Parenthood on her phone, visits a pharmacy, then returned to her apartment. While previously the various components of this journey would be scattered among several services, cross-device tracking allows companies to infer that the user received treatment for an STD. The combination of information across devices not only creates serious privacy concerns, but also allows for companies to make incorrect and possibly harmful assumptions about individuals.”
Discussion of these issues are in the works, so cross-device tracking is likely to be a topic we’ll be hearing more about.
As reported by The Atlantic, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the CDT said “he hopes the FTC will issue guidelines for building transparency and control into cross-device tracking technologies.”