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Google Ad-Tech Users Can Target National Security ‘Decision Makers’ and People With Chronic Diseases
Google enables marketers to target people with serious illnesses and crushing debt—against its policies—as well as the makers of classified defense technology, a WIRED investigation has found.
Other lists of American users accessible for a price across the platform raise serious national security concerns, experts say, as they reveal data brokers striving to isolate millions of mobile devices carried by government workers—from US judges and military service members to executive agency staff and employees on Capitol Hill. The data—first obtained by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), Ireland's oldest independent human rights body—reveals segments targeting hundreds of millions of device users based exclusively on health conditions, from chronic pain and menopause to, among others, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension. Demonstrating the point, many data brokers that exist on the periphery of Google’s advertising exchange work to assist marketers by crafting complex dossiers on individual consumers, “enriching” anonymized profiles with information drawn from a range of public and government sources.
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