Dr. Johnny Ryan:

I thank the Chair and the distinguished members of the international committee. I represent Brave, a private web browser. Our CEO, Brendan Eich, invented JavaScript and co-founded Firefox. Since those early days, as all members are aware, the web has become grimy. Millions of people use Brave to make the web safe, fast and private. The problem of disinformation arises because of what happens every time one loads a web page. As the page loads, a broadcast of information about the user is sent to tens or hundreds of companies.This is intended to allow technology companies that represent advertisers to compete for the opportunity to show the user an ad. That sounds fine, but the broadcast data includes an inference of the user's sexual orientation, political views, religion, and any health issues from which he or she may suffer. It generally includes the precise thing the user is watching, listening to or reading at that moment, as well as where he or she is located. These data are bundled with identification codes for the user that are as specific to the user as his or her social security number. All the data I described can be put into a dossier about the user, whatever age he or she may be. This is a description of the multibillion dollar real-time bidding, RTB, industry. The broadcasts occur hundreds of billions of times per day. My written submission contains plenty of footnotes with evidence for this. This relates to perfect information from micro-targeted disinformation. I should say that I did not set a timer, but I will not filibuster.

It is almost certain that every voter in every election has been profiled based on almost everything they watch, read and listen to online. That is problem number one. The second problem is that the real-time bidding industry, which involves advertising, is a cancer eating at the heart of legitimate media. That works in at least two ways. If a person visits the website of The Irish Times, for which I used to work and for which Dr. Lillington currently works, and reads about a luxury car, and then later in the day that person goes to a less reputable website, it is very likely he or she will be targeted with an ad for a luxury car because the companies that received the information profiling that person as a high-value Irish Times reader interested in cars can now, at a significant discount, show him or her the ad on the poor quality website.

That happens even if one is not human. What about an ad for a bot? Not only does audience arbitrage, as it is referred to in the industry, commodify a worthy publisher with a unique audience, it also allows a criminal to operate fake people who pretend to view and click on ads. This diverts an estimated $5.8 billion to $42 billion per year from worthy publishers out of the wallets of real advertisers and into the pockets of criminals.

There is a glimmer of light, though. I admit that it comes from my company. We have been pioneering a new system of private ads that are opt-in. The engagement rate has been sky high over the past six months. We are proving that privacy can be good business.

We at Brave urge the grand committee's distinguished members to take a single specific action, that being, to pressure with their intergovernmental weight the two entities that control this global system. The first is called the Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB. Its largest members are Facebook and Google and it controls the rules about how real-time bidding, RTB, works and what can be in a broadcast. The second is Google itself, which has its own proprietary version. We have given detailed evidence to 16 regulators through colleagues across Europe and we have seen investigations triggered under GDPR into both entities. This is good. Twelve months later, though, we are still awaiting enforcement.

If there is one thing we can leave the grand committee with, it is a plea to stop the business model of the bottom of the web and starve the data brokers who enable micro-targeted disinformation. There is an easy way to do that.