Americans face new threats to their personal privacy as phone and cable Internet service providers (ISPs), along with leading Internet companies, expand their ability to capture details about what we do online in order to target you with data-driven personalized advertising. A report from the Center for Digital Democracy, focuses on the recent data- and video-related advertising practices of AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Charter, Cox, Verizon, Dish, Time Warner Cable, Viacom, Google, News Corp. (Fox), Turner Broadcasting (Time Warner), and Disney, .

According ot the report, ISPs have formed partnerships with powerful data brokers (including Acxiom, Krux, and Oracle Marketing Cloud), gaining new insights into our online and offline behaviors. They are incorporating "Big Data" practices, such as "programmatic advertising" that instantaneously buys and sells individual consumers—to financial marketers, fast-food companies, and health advertisers, for example - all without the consumer’s knowledge.

"In the process, ISPs have transformed TV and digital video into a vast new source of personal information, analyzing set-top box and streaming-video data for our viewing habits, and combining that information with sensitive online and offline data (including financial, health, racial, ethnic, and location) to compile detailed "digital dossiers" on millions of Americans," the report says.

According to the report:

• AT&T, through its AdWorks division, has developed a "cross-screen system to match users’ mobile, online and television devices together based on identifiers and systems" that the company has "access to." It operates a "consumer insights platform" that uses "Big-Data" techniques to advance AT&T’s targeted-marketing objectives.
• Comcast is using Rubicon’s Advertising Automation Cloud, "one of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, [which] leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real time" to buy and sell individuals to marketers.
• Verizon, by acquiring mobile-marketing-data company Millennial Media, gained access to customer data gathered by more than 60,000 apps, including "location, social, interest, and contextual" information. Millennial has "developed more than 700 million active server-side unique user profiles, over 60 million of which link multiple mobile devices and PCs to a single specific user ... ," with some 175 million monthly unique users in the "United States alone."

ISPs have been subject to privacy oversight from the Federal Trade Commission, as other Internet companies are. The FCC's pending proceeding on privacy could examine all the ways that broadband networks operated by Internet service providers gather and use consumer information today.