Brookings January 13, 2022
Driven by lockdown policies and a fear of contracting COVID-19, many individuals have moved to seek online alternatives for many of their offline activities over the pandemic, leading to a surge in online traffic—and increased tracking by commercial and public websites. These websites then share the data they collect with third parties, who aggregate the data to create user profiles for advertising purposes. Many of these third parties are unknown to users and have access to users’ data without their explicit consent. Additionally, while users may agree to share one specific data type with a website, an aggregation of various data types across many different websites can enable third parties to use advanced data analytics to make very precise inferences...