‘Supercookies’ Have Privacy Experts Sounding the Alarm
Customers of some phone companies in Germany, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, have had a slightly different browsing experience from those on other providers since early April. Rather than seeing ads through regular third-party tracking cookies stored on devices, they’ve been part of a trial called TrustPid.
TrustPid allows mobile carriers to generate pseudo-anonymous tokens based on a user’s IP address that are administered by a company also named TrustPid. Each user is assigned a different token for each participating website they visit, and these can be used to provide personalized product recommendations—but in what TrustPid calls “a secure and privacy-friendly way.” It’s that “privacy-friendly” part that has raised critics’ hackles.
The internet runs on advertising: Digital ads worth a total of $189 billion were bought and sold last year, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). But the ad industry’s dirty little not-so-secret is that it relies on intrusive surveillance of people’s online activities, piecing together their interests based on the websites they visit, what they post, and more.
