Examples of Abuse

Almost everyday a company or government abuses your data. Whether these abuses are intentional or the result of error, we must learn from these abuses so that we can better build tomorrow's policies and technologies. This resource is an opportunity to learn that this has all happened before, as well as a tool to query these abuses.

Please contact us if you think we are missing some key stories.

 

07 Dec 2010
In 2010, Quantcast and Clearspring agreed to settle class action lawsuits brought against them over their use of Flash cookies. Flash cookies are "Local Storage Objects" stored by Adobe's Flash player plug-in; unaffected by browser privacy settings, they can respawn HTTP cookies after a user finds
12 May 2013
In 2013, Twitter announced it would partner with numerous advertising companies including Quantcast and Oracle's BlueKai to create "tailored audiences". Twitter claims the service anbles advertisers to define targeted groups of current and prospective customers who have "shown interest" in their
15 May 2014
In 2013 and 2014, Quantcast's CEO, Konrad Feldman, claimed that real-time bidding, the latest trend in advertising technology, was providing a new way to game advertisers. RTB, also known as "programmatic" advertising, uses cookies to track what users have looked at and then retarget them through
10 Jul 2015
In 2015, Quantcast launched Audience Grid, an "open data marketing platform" to combine the data it collects from websites with data on audience habits collected by partners such as Tivo Research and Oracle's Datalogix. The combination is intended to give online advertisers greater insight into
05 Nov 2015
In 2015, Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman explained his purpose in starting up the company in 2006: "to manufacture data to make advertising more relevant for consumers". By 2015, as display advertising on the web was beginning to use the targeting techniques previously preserved for search advertising
11 Feb 2017
In 2017, Quantcast, which measures visitors to over 150 million web destinations, announced it would partner with Quantium, a company that collects purchase data and analytics, to bridge the gap between offline and online audiences and provide insight into the patterns of online consumer behaviour
23 Jan 2018
In 2018, Quantcast began expanding into Asia, opening operations in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The company explained the move was part of a market "tipping point", in which AI would transform every customer experience, company, and industry
22 May 2018
In 2018, a week before the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU, Quantcast and several other publishing industry groups complained that Google in an open letter that Google was imposing GDPR risks on publishers and consumers. Under the system Google proposed for GDPR
16 Aug 2018
In August 2018, three months after the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU, Quantcast reported that over 90% of visitors to websites using the company's Quantcast Choice consent management platform were giving consent to at least some use of cookies. About 81% were