To catch a priest (Aug 2. 2021)

Here’s a (possibly) mind-blowing fact: just about every time you load a web page on a browser, or click to a new experience inside an app, there’s code being run that sends your data to an ad exchange, which then broadcasts that data to hundreds of potential bidders (themselves connected to countless actual advertisers). For every click of yours, picture a dense bundle of data going into the cloud and instantly duplicating into hundreds of copies to thousands of servers, each one accessing millions of rows of data to figure out who you are. That’s the pulsing, arterial information flow of the modern mobile internet, and it beats billions of times a day.

To catch a priest (Aug 2, 2021)

The way the data got out was very simple and as designed: via the programmatic real-time ads-buying technology, a complex edifice that’s been built brick by kludgy brick for two decades now. Specifically, via the MoPub ad exchange currently managed by Twitter, which is about the only exchange that would work with a somewhat edgy (for brands at least) company like Grindr.

What goes out with every pulse of the attention economy? Well, it’s right there in the MoPub developer docs, as the component objects of what’s known as a ‘bid request.’ The bid request is the packaged snippet of data that blasted out from the computer talking to your mobile device, and thence to the various ‘demand side platforms’ (DSPs, think of them almost like the stock-buying software in high-frequency trading).