Nearly 75 Million Americans Are Unwittingly Sharing Their Data Online

Blis, the integrated ad planning, buying, and measurement platform, launched its new study revealing that nearly 75 million Americans are unaware that, by sharing their email or phone number, they are also consenting to be anonymously identified by advertisers. Additionally, 38% of consumers who are aware of it still find it invasive.

Publishers and platforms that use emails or phone numbers as advertising signals, such as The TradeDesk's Unified ID, may face consumer backlash. More pragmatically for advertisers, these solutions don't do what marketers are hoping for. A previous Blis study revealed that half of mobile audiences and almost half of desktop audiences are already unreachable across the open internet. And now, according to the new findings, advertisers choosing to use Unified ID solutions in the hope of regaining access to that missing portion of the audience may actually be still missing them or, even more concerningly, continuing to make consumers feel that advertising is invasive. 

The study also shows that a significant part of consumers still need help understanding the value exchange of advertising. Almost a third of consumers either don’t understand or are unsure why advertising is crucial to keeping the Internet free. However, 84% of media agencies assume the opposite, showing a disconnect between what media planners think consumers know and what they genuinely do.

The research shows that while Google began phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome, over half of marketers and media planners haven’t yet tested the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. Of the 39% of respondents that have tested it, 56% work in media agencies, and 44% are brand marketers. As the latest IAB Tech Lab report pointed out, Privacy Sandbox presents numerous problems, such as supporting certain use cases such as lookalike modeling, frequency capping, and interoperability. 

“As we’ve been saying for years, finding cookieless solutions that truly allow advertisers to reach their audiences accurately is not an easy task,” said Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis. “However, most of the solutions out there just partially support advertisers in reaching the audience, which is already unreachable since third-party cookies started to be removed from the open internet. The crucial point to remember is that brands must find a good balance between their chosen solutions to ensure consumers don’t feel uncomfortable with ads. After all, their privacy concerns are exactly what brought the industry to where we are.”

Blis commissioned an independent study from Sapio Research among a representative group of 2000 consumers and 200 media agencies and brands across the US. The main findings, along with recommendations, are available In their latest report: 2024 and the Great Privacy Disconnect.