This Global Identity System Tracks Everything You Do Online

It’s nearly seven years since we first wrote about the complex web of surveillance capitalism, a massive machine which tracks everything you do and everywhere you go online. That article drew on an important report from Cracked Labs, written by Wolfie Christl, who had meticulously pieced together the jigsaw puzzle of players that keep this vast surveillance machine humming for profit.  

Today, practically everyone online is aware at least vaguely that they are being watched, but exactly how that is being done still remains rather mysterious – not least because the main players like it that way. That makes a new report from Cracked Labs extremely valuable, because it dives deep into the ways in which one of the key players in the surveillance advertising ecosystem gathers and exploits your personal data.

The 61-page report concerns the company LiveRamp. Although unknown outside advertising circles, it claims to maintain “the largest and most accurate people-based identity graph on the market.” “Identity graph” is a fancy way of saying the complex and vital web of connections between key aspects of people’s lives. According to the Cracked Labs report, LiveRamp sells data on 700 million consumers globally from 150 data providers through its data marketplace. 

There are plenty of these data brokers, but what makes LiveRamp special is how it brings together personal data obtained from multiple sources. It has created a global identity system that assigns every person one or more proprietary identifiers, which are linked to key personal attributes such as names, postal addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as digital IDs that refer to browsers, smartphones, and other devices. In effect, LiveRamp has created what is probably the world’s most complete shadow identity system, with detailed profiles for a large proportion of the world’s online users:

Many businesses in the digital marketing industry utilize LiveRamp’s identity surveillance technology to recognize, track, follow, profile and target people across the digital world and trade profile information about them. The company also promotes its identity graph systems as a solution to sell behavioral advertising “without third-party cookies.”

There are two main parts to LiveRamp’s system:

• The AbiliTec identity graph links different identifiers to each other, including names, postal addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. In a sense, this is a database of “classic” personal information, mostly in the physical world.  
• The RampID system by contrast collects and stores a wide range of digital markers that refer to people, including mobile device IDs, cookie IDs, connected TV IDs, and other proprietary identities, for example customer IDs used by ecommerce systems. LiveRamp claims to have collected information on 14 billion devices.

The RampID is a pseudonymous string of alphanumeric characters; it does not in itself reveal the identity of the person it refers to. That said, it would probably be fairly straightforward to link people with their RampIDs given the range of data they refer to – it’s well known that just a few key details are enough to identify specific individuals.

RampIDs are vendor-specific, so different companies receive different RampIDs for the same individual. However, many of LiveRamp’s clients are themselves data intermediaries that process millions of people’s personal data on behalf of their own clients. This means RampIDs can be used to exchange personal data between many actors in the adtech market. It’s also possible to convert between the RampIDs used by different clients, allowing an even wider transfer of personal data between companies. Here’s how the RampIDs are typically used:

companies send consumer records that contain identifying information to LiveRamp, which tries to find matching person records in its identity databases and then returns a pseudonymous “RampID” identifier that refers to a partial or full person record in the company’s identity databases. LiveRamp’s clients can utilize the RampID system to combine and link personal data across databases and exchange personal data across companies. They can utilize it to track website and mobile app users, recognize and profile people by “onboarding” entire customer databases and then transmit consumer records to adtech firms or large platforms for ad targeting and other purposes via LiveRamp’s “Connect” platform.  

The Connect platform allows LiveRamp’s clients to send consumer records to Google, Facebook, large publishers, adtech firms and other data companies.  Data brokers and other businesses can utilize LiveRamp’s identity data and its data marketplace to sell consumer data to other companies. Whatever the details of the operations, the principal goal of this complex transfer of personal data between hundreds of players is to allow companies to show specific groups of consumers micro-targeted ads. For example, RampIDs are frequently used for the industry-standard real-time bidding (RTB) system, whereby customized digital ads are placed on sites dynamically, and in real time, as people visit them. 

LiveRamp is aware that its system raises important ethical questions about privacy and control. On its Web site, it states that “Data Ethics Isn’t Something We Do. It’s Part of Who We Are.” It offers a number of privacy tools, including the ability to opt out of the LiveRamp system. The Opt Out page includes the following comment: “if you opt out… the ads you see will generally not be tied to any multi-site behavioral data, and are more likely to be “contextual” based simply on the website you are viewing.”  

In other words, even without the huge and complex RampID system, sites would still be able to sell ads and make money. Moreover, visitors to those sites would see useful ads based on what they are viewing, not on huge databases that track everything they do online, and that try to second-guess what people’s deepest desires might be. Seven years after we first reported on the scale of surveillance advertising, isn’t it time to move on to a better system based on contextual ads?