One Company May Know Everything About You

[Celerity]

The world’s largest advertising conglomerate has proposed merging with the company that has built detailed profiles on every American.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/01/one-company-may-know-everything-about-you/


Credit: Screenshot/LiveRamp

A disturbing story at the intersection of innovations in war and our surveillance economy broke last week. Reuters reported on a letter sent by U.S. Central Command to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) back in April, revealing that U.S. military troop locations had been tracked using commercial location data. Such information collected from phones and other connected devices can uncover patterns and movements to inform attacks on military targets. Wyden told Reuters that we need to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”

I can’t say that this danger was top of mind for us when we opted out of spying on our readers and eliminated programmatic advertising on prospect.org. But it’s indisputable that carrying around a tracking device in your pocket can lead to a myriad of potential dangers beyond getting a geolocated ad for a nearby restaurant. That this information can be sold to third-party data brokers heightens those threats. There are ways for the military to anonymize data on the devices it requisitions, and discourage use of browsers like Chrome that have surveillance embedded inside them. But endless tracking leads to more quotidian outcomes than deciphering troop movements. And soon, the architecture that makes the tracking work could fall into the hands of a foreign acquirer.

Publicis Groupe is the largest of the Big Three global advertising conglomerates (the others are WPP and Omnicom), and by itself it captured almost one-third of all global billings last year. A couple of weeks ago, Publicis announced its intention to buy LiveRamp in a $2.5 billion deal. This is the company that combines multiple inputs of an individual’s personal data (web activity, subscriptions, apps, travel, retail, financial, and even medical history) to generate an “identity graph,” a precise profile of our lives and actions.

LiveRamp is said to have built identity graphs on 245 million Americans, virtually every U.S. adult. These can be used in any context, from web to apps to smart TVs. “LiveRamp makes possible the data integration empowering cross-platform tracking,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. And in the past, it has reportedly sold identity graph information segmented by military or pregnancy status, among others. Publicis, a French multinational, has been gradually acquiring data firms, from data broker Epsilon to “end-to-end data solution” Lotame. Publicis represents global juggernauts like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and its global reach could expand the identity graph everywhere. It is even the largest Western advertiser in China, with about 20 percent of the Chinese media agency market and partnerships with Tencent and Alibaba. Its clients hold massive troves of personal information which LiveRamp can make more valuable through targeting at the individual level.

snip

[malaise]

1. Scary

Rec