Data Regulators are failing to enforce GDPR which is leading to massive ongoing Data Breaches and Exploitations of Privacy Details

At the root of the Irish investigation is Google and IAB's Real-Time Bidding (RTB) element - which is a core part of their Programmatic Advertising Solutions. This RTB system is automatically and insecurely sharing Personally Identifiable Privacy Details to around 1,000 affiliated companies that buy into those services.

These same RTB systems share around 120 billion data broadcasts each day - where there is no Explicit Consent obtained from the Privacy owners for sharing those details at all.

This same form of data exploitation has already been used to influence Polish Parliamentary elections, target victims of substance abuse, track people's movements during Covid-19 lockdown, and to profile Black Lives Matter protestors - all illicitly and wholly in flagrant violation of the law. And while we're all aware of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal - still relatively few are aware of the very significant problems posed by Google in this regard.

Just three ad exchanges (OpenX, IndexExchange and PubMatic) have made around 113.9 trillion RTB broadcasts (info shares) in the past year.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) - which is also to a degree the arbiter and regulator for the online advertising industry is actually wholly guilty of presiding over these evident advertising abuses. It kind of undermines their credibility in trying to set up a new standard for cookie-tracking as its lack of responsibility towards the end user, and would likely lead to further exploitation.

The Data Regulators and Commissioners seem to be wholly incapable of policing their areas of accountability in a suitably expedient or impactful manner. The glacial pace at which they react to flagrant ongoing exploitations means that the damage is multiplying on their watch - while they do little or nothing about it.

GDPR was always going to be a difficult challenge to monitor and regulate, and there of course would be some cases that slipped through the net. While nowadays it seems as if most everything is slipping through the net - and as a result those unscrupulous parties have sort of been given carte blanche to do their worst.

GDPR will only ever work if it is properly monitored and enforced - and the correct penalties dealt out to offenders - which really just doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.