This French company has very detailed personal information on almost all Internet users. Worse, thanks to them, it can predict their behavior.
Like most people, you probably ignore the enormous amount of personal data that you collect about you without your knowledge on the internet. HAS Each time you accept the conditions of use of a site, an application or a service, you allow companies to collect and use information on your activities and tastes. But some record it much more, and not only on the internet.
This is the role of data brokers (or Data Brokers in English), which run your activities, both online and in the real world. They collect information from different sources to build a detailed profile of you, then sell it. Not only do they know your “basic” (name, age, sex, level of studies, consumption habits, etc.) data, but also much more sensitive information, such as your income level, your health or even your criminal record.
This business has existed for many years. It is even one of Google’s main activities (and other tech giants like Meta) that use these profiles for their advertising agencies and thus garner comfortable income. But he is taking a much more disturbing dimension with artificial intelligence (the famous AI that agitates the planet). And this does not only concern large American companies: a famous French group has just demonstrated it edifying.
This company is Publicis Groupe, a French multinational specialized in advertising and communication. After having bought data brokers (Epsilon in 2019 and Lotame in 2025), the group recently unveiled a new connected identity tool called Coreai. In A video published recently on YouTube; Arthur Sadoun, the group’s CEO, explains (in a very Frenchy English) that this new generation system collects information for some 4 billion people, and, above all, that it makes it possible to analyze and predict the habits and the behavior of consumers, on an individual scale.
He takes the example of a young woman, whom he names Lola. “”Basically, we know who is Lola, what she looks at, what she reads and with whom she lives“He explains.”Thanks to the power of connected identity, we also know her subscriptions on social networks, her online and offline purchases, where she buys, when she buys and more importantly, why she buys“.
“”We know that Lola has two children and that her children drink a lot of premium fruit juice. We can see that the price of the product it buys continues to increase with its local retailer. We can also see that Lola’s income did not follow inflation. We can therefore anticipate that she could turn to a cheaper brand and therefore adjust the advertisements she sees, by highlighting a more affordable brand, at the right time and on all her screens“. Publicis boasts openly: we are watched by an advertising big brother, capable of knowing and predicting the behavior of 91 % of adults connected in the world.
What power have data protection laws in all of this? The problem is that the data brokerage environment is particularly underregulated and opaque. In Europe, the GDPR stipulates that consumers must provide explicit consent before any data collection and that they can at any time ask companies to delete stored personal data – but this is not the case in all other countries.
But, very often, said consent is drowned in the mentions written in very small of most websites. It is therefore not always easy to determine to what extent you give up control of your data. In addition, most government agencies do not have the resources necessary to enforce the laws on privacy on the scale that escape them. Not to mention that the fines imposed on these companies in the event of non-compliance with the law are derisory in relation to what this business reports …