Real-Time Bidding: selling private data in 100 ms for $0.0005

fierman writes: In a work to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (ISOC NDSS'14), INRIA researchers show the privacy risks of Real-Time Bidding, High-Frequency Trading for selling advertisement spaces. Combining Real-Time Bidding and Cookie Matching advertisers can significantly improve their tracking and profiling capabilities and both technologies are already prevalent on the Web. The research discusses the value of users' private data (Web Browsing History) retrieved directly from the advertisers, leveraging of an exposed information leak in RTB systems. pay about $0.0005 for displaying ads to the user, at the same time acquiring information about them. Evidence of price variation with users' profiles, pysical location, time of day and content of visited sites is also shown. Prices for ads are much higher for users located in US, than in Europe. The research highlights that the technology is not transparent in that the lists and numbers of buyers of users' data is not known. However, a list of Doubleclick's Cookie Matching partners was disclosed.
Users can also experience their real-time evaluations using a released transparency enhancing
tool.