If you are present on the Internet, you are definitely an object of targeting. This term is widely used in marketing, but we decided to look at this phenomenon from the legal side, from the perspective of privacy, and conducted a study that we want to share with you.
In the series of articles entitled "Targeting in social networks" you will learn:
Targeting is an advertising tool that allows you to select from the entire existing audience (for example, among the users of a certain social network) only that part that meets the given criteria (age, gender, location, preferences, etc.), and show advertising specifically to it.
Users are persons who are registered in the online service (have an account) and unregistered persons (that is, without creating an account). Users will be considered "data subjects" within the meaning of Article 4(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
A social network provider is a person who:
The social network provider collects large amounts of personal data that:
A targeter is a person who uses social media services to direct specific messages to a group of social media users based on specific parameters or criteria.
Targeting can be based on:
Provided data is data that is actively and knowingly provided by the user (for example, postal address, username, age, place of residence, language, gender, interests, place of work, relationship status, etc.)
Inferred data is data created by the social network provider based on user-provided data and observed data.
Observable data – data provided by the data subject as a result of the use of the service or device (e.g. the data subject's search history, traffic data, location data, preferences data).
In all three cases, the target and the social network provider are joint controllers according to Article 26 of the GDPR:
The targeter applies to the social network provider with a request for advertising. The targeter indicates the categories of persons whose personal data should be used. The social network provider offers the targeter certain types of personal data provided by users and which will be used as parameters for determining the target audience of advertising (age, gender, marital status, etc.).
For example, a men's shoe store wants to promote the sale of its winter collection. For his ad campaign, he wants to target men between the ages of 30 and 45 who have indicated that they are single on their social media profiles. The social network provider provides this personal data to the target as parameters for determining the target audience to which its advertising should be displayed.
Data is collected through the social network itself.
The user uses the service of the social network provider, which collects data about him with the help of the user's permissions, which were granted at the beginning of using the service.
For example, a person installed a social network provider's program on their smartphone. This application continuously collects information about a person's location using the GPS functions of their phone, using the permissions that were granted to the social network provider when the application was installed. Person stayed in a hotel located next to a pizzeria. The pizzeria uses a geo-targeting feature offered by a social media provider for people who are within 1 km of its premises for the first time in the last 6 months. When a person opens a social media provider's app on their phone, a person will see an ad for a pizzeria.
Data is collected via external websites using social plugins or pixels.
The user goes to the targeter's website. The targeter installs a social network provider's tracking pixel on its website, which automatically collects data.
For example, a person searches the Internet for a backpack to buy. She visits a store's website, looks at a number of products, but decides not to make a purchase. A store operator wants to target social media users who have visited their website without making a purchase. For this purpose, it integrates a “tracking pixel” on its website provided by the social network provider. After a person leaves the store's website and logs into their social media account, they start seeing ads for the backpacks they were looking at while browsing the store's website).
The social network provider monitors the behavior of its users over a long period of time, both on and off social networks, in combination with data provided by the user (e.g. age, gender, job details, pages visited, time spent on each page, number of repeated connections to this page, search terms, hyperlinks, preferences, etc.). Thanks to this, the social network provider can obtain information about the interests, other characteristics of the user and provide the targeter with this data as parameters for determining the target audience of the advertisement.
For example, a person indicated on his page in a social network that he is interested in sports. She also downloaded an application on her mobile phone to follow the latest results of sports games, set the sports games page in her browser as the home page on her laptop. This person frequently visits a number of online gambling sites. The social network provider monitors the activity of this person on the phone and laptop, and concludes that he will be interested in betting online. The provider transfers this data to the target online bookmaker.
In the next article, we will talk about the risks of targeting in relation to data privacy, transparency of data processing and sensitive data.
LinkedIn
YouTube
Instagram
Facebook
Telegram
Medium
Serhii Floreskul
,
Violetta Loseva
,
