Personalized advertising is based on the assumption that advertising is only effective if it reaches the right target audience.

This sacred mantra drives an entire industry.

Advertisers want to know what websites you come from, what topics you are interested in, what gender and age you are and what your income is.

In essence, it is about using technical tricks to secretly provide users with a personal profile, to track activities and not only to use such data for their own advertising, but also to sell it to third parties.

The advertising industry's tracking tricks are increasingly seen as an intolerable invasion of privacy.

Cookies were used in the past, but today the spying tricks are more differentiated because people delete cookies or regularly change their IP address.

Vodafone and Telekom are now launching a push in which such resistance fails: They want to link surfing behavior with the mobile phone or SIM card number.

Ten years ago, the American mobile operator Verizon had already implemented the idea of ​​a lifelong, unique "super cookie".

With a personal ID, Verizon was able to monitor every customer in detail across all apps and applications, regardless of their privacy settings.

Incidentally, the current idea from Vodafone and Telekom is called Trust Pid.

But who should you trust here?