THE BUSINESS OF YOUR DATA
You hand over your data for free and they sell it
You open a newspaper. Before it finishes loading, your machine has asked for twenty or thirty addresses that do not belong to the newspaper: companies that buy and sell the ad slot you are about to see, and that need to know who you are in order to auction it. You do not choose them, nobody introduces them, and you could almost certainly not name one. This page names them.
How it works, in four steps
- You open a site. The site has advertising slots it sells to the highest bidder.
- The auction takes milliseconds, and to bid you need to know who the ad is for: where you are, what you looked at before, which device you are on.
- For that, several companies have to agree that "you" are the same person who was on another site yesterday. That is called matching identifiers, and some names say so out loud: `user-sync`, `sync`, `prebid`.
- None of this is charged to you. You pay for it with the data.
Who they are
Each card says what the company does, where it is and, where one exists, the penalty a regulator or a court has imposed, with a link to the file. What could not be checked is not here.
Criteo
| Headquarters | Paris · France |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Retargeting: it shows you again, on another site, the product you looked at before. |
| Reaches your machine as | criteo.com, criteo.net |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements: 18 queries on a test PC in 24 hours. |
The French authority concluded that Criteo could not demonstrate that the users of its 40,000 partners had given consent before their data was collected and shared for advertising. The proposed fine came down from 60 to 40 million after the hearing. The French Council of State later upheld it.
CNIL · 22 JUN 2023 · deliberación SAN-2023-009 ↗LiveRamp
| Headquarters | San Francisco · United States |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Identity. Its ATS product turns a signed-in person into an identifier of its own, the "RampID", used to recognise the same person across different sites without cookies. |
| Reaches your machine as | privacymanager.io, rlcdn.com, pippio.com |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements: `ats-wrapper.privacymanager.io`, on a test PC. |
In its own words: "ATS allows publishers to resolve consented user data with a RampID in real time." — LiveRamp documentation ↗
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
Kochava
| Headquarters | Sandpoint, Idaho · United States |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Ad attribution and mobile location data. |
| Reaches your machine as | kochava.com |
The FTC obtained an order banning Kochava from selling sensitive location data. The complaint held that it sold the precise location of hundreds of millions of phones, enough to follow a person to clinics, places of worship or shelters.
FTC · 4 MAY 2026 ↗Verve Group
| Headquarters | Stockholm · Sweden |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Video and mobile advertising: it auctions, in milliseconds, the ad slot you are about to see. Smaato and the former LKQD are part of the group. |
| Reaches your machine as | lkqd.net, smaato.net |
| In our measurements | It is the most requested unclassified name on a whole test PC: 380 queries to `cs.lkqd.net` in 24 hours. |
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
RTB House
| Headquarters | Warsaw · Poland |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Machine-learning retargeting: it shows you again what you looked at. |
| Reaches your machine as | creativecdn.com |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements. |
In its own words: "We operate under the creativecdn.com domain while providing our services." — RTB House privacy policy ↗
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
FreeWheel
| Headquarters | New York · a Comcast company · United States |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Television and video advertising. The name it reaches machines by, `user-sync.fwmrm.net`, says what it does: matching a person’s identifier between different companies. |
| Reaches your machine as | fwmrm.net |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements. |
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
Didomi
| Headquarters | Paris · France |
|---|---|
| What it sells | The cookie window. It collects your consent answer and stores it for the site you are visiting. |
| Reaches your machine as | privacy-center.org |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements. |
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
OneTag
| Headquarters | London · Companies House 09905190 · United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| What it sells | Ad auction: it connects whoever sells the slot with whoever buys it. |
| Reaches your machine as | onetag-sys.com |
| In our measurements | It appears in this project’s measurements. |
No penalties known to us in the sources consulted. That says nothing for or against: it says we have not found any.
What this page does NOT say
- It does not say these companies do anything illegal. What they do is published on their own sites and rests on a consent most people accept without reading. The only thing this page asserts about anyone's legality is what a regulator or a court has already ruled, and where that happened it is on their card, with the date and a link to the file. Nothing else.
- It does not say what data of yours each one holds. GUARDIANA sees service names, never content: we know your machine asked for that address, and nothing more.
- It does not say a penalty from years ago still describes the company today. The date is beside it so it is read with it.
- If you are one of these companies and a figure is wrong, write to hola@guardianagroup.com and it is corrected with its date, as everywhere else on this site.
And what GUARDIANA has to do with it
GUARDIANA does not block ads and does not promise to take you out of this business. It does something smaller and harder to argue with: it shows you the names. When one of these services appears in your ledger, it comes with its company, its country and what it sells. Then you decide.