#AdTech#DataProtection#Privacy#TargetedAds: "In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library.
Her audiobook consumption, she explained, had been highly focused the previous month, focused on a specific subgenre that she doesn't believe would come up by chance.
"You don't coincidentally come across mobile ads [for that particular subgenre]," she told The Register. "Those ads made me extremely angry."
Concerns about the privacy of library reading material date back to the early 20th century, explained Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and library-school instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to The Register.
"There was a time when American libraries weren't sure what their stance on reader privacy should be," said Salo."
Our industry has never really questioned the notion that one-to-one marketing is a worthy goal. Rather than learn the lessons of the consumer rebellion that led to GDPR, CCPA, and countless other regulations, we are embarking on a new style of consumer spying based on a new set of private signals. Today we are leveraging those signals to bully people into buying stuff they don’t need as well as instill in them irrational fears in order to prompt them to support anti-democracy candidates.
Why are we repeating the same mistakes? And make no mistake about it, the “alternatives” to third-party cookies function in the same way; they log a consumer’s private behavior and use it to follow them around the internet. Today we stand on the dawn of cookie-free advertising, tasked with reimagining the world. Instead, we are dangerously close to a colossal failure of imagination. Our focus is on identity resolution graphs and hashed emails — the exact kind of tracking we had with third-party cookies. Call it surveillance capitalism 2.0."
#EU#CJEU#GDPR#DataProtection#BigTech#AdTech#TargetedAds#OnlineTracking: "In a landmark decision on 7 March 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a groundbreaking judgment against online targeted ads prohibited by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This ruling has far-reaching implications for major platforms, including giants like Google and TikTok, that rely on the online personalised advertising industry as part of their business model. The Court recognised that invasive tracking and profiling cannot be sanctioned through ‘consent’ pop-ups, responding to a complaint that focused on the mechanisms facilitating the covert profiling and monitoring of the private activities of a majority of individuals across the digital realm. The court’s decision emphasised the need for stricter controls on the online tracking and advertising industry." https://edri.org/our-work/europes-highest-court-delivers-landmark-judgment-against-iab-europe-in-gdpr-consent-spam-pop-ups-case/
Meet the guy who taught US intelligence agencies how to make the most of the ad tech ecosystem, "the largest information-gathering enterprise ever conceived by man." #privacy#advertising
#DataProtection#Privacy#TargetedAds#OptOut: "Several technologies can help individuals configure their devices to automatically opt out of web services’ requests to sell or share personal information for targeted advertising. Seven state privacy laws require that organizations honor opt-out requests. This blog post discusses the legal landscape governing Universal Opt-Out Mechanisms (UOOMs), as well as the key differences between the leading UOOMs in terms of setup, default settings, and whether those settings can be configured. We then offer guidance to policymakers to consider clarity and consistency in establishing, interpreting, and enforcing UOOM mandates."
#SocialMedia#Instagram#Meta#Algorithms#TargetedAds: "Besides being delivered directly to me by Instagram’s algorithm, thousands of these ads can be trivially found on Meta’s ad library by searching “t.me,” which is the link shortener for Telegram, exposing a massive content moderation and ad screening failure by the company.
Many of these services are being advertised as part of a side hustle culture. Most of the ads I’ve gotten are of young men wearing ski masks holding gigantic stacks of cash with captions like “Take 10 minutes out of your day to learn how,” “make some bread,” “join tele to make $50k a month,” “going to eat or starve?,” “learn to make a bag,” “While some of y’all WATCHING us get RICH… EVERYONE else is TAPPIN in for the CASHAPP MONEY DROP to get RICH!” Once on Telegram, it becomes immediately clear that these accounts want to help you get rich by simply helping you deal drugs, steal people’s money, or by draining hacked bank accounts or using stolen debit and credit cards.
The ads are a window into a blatantly illegal underground economy of drug dealers, hackers, and scammers that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but is actively profiting from and injecting into users’ feeds."
#Canada#C18#LinkTaxes#BigTech#News#Media#Journalism#Meta#Google#TargetedAds: "The link tax laws passed around the world have typically been justified on the grounds that companies such as Google and Meta are are using links drive traffic to news sites, but keeping any profits from advertising in the process. In other words, online advertising means Google and Meta have taken control of the online advertising that used to be the mainstay of news publishers.
As a previous PIA article explained, today’s advertising system is based on constant surveillance of site visitors, but Google and Meta retain most of the revenue. In other words, if C-18 aims to fix the publishing industry’s financial challenges, the solution isn’t introducing link taxes that don’t address the real problem. Instead, news publishers could move to context-based advertising, which respects the privacy of visitors, and doesn’t hand most of the ad revenue to intermediaries like Google and Meta."
#Cellphones#Mobile#Ads#Advertising#AdTech#TargetedAds: "The gradual infiltration of advertising into any and all spaces that also contain human eyes and/or ears is neither new nor unique to the tech industry — “ad creep” was coined in the ’90s — but among companies with successful platforms and popular apps, it is particularly acute. Some of the largest modern tech companies are, if not explicitly advertising firms, built on advertising assumptions. Google is a search engine and Instagram is a social network, but for most users, both of them are free, and advertising is implied.
This isn’t ideal — advertising is arguably never ideal — but it’s a deal, and implies certain norms: Google is a thing you can expect to use in exchange for being sold to advertisers, whose ads you will see. The broad tendency among internet companies making explicit bids for attention has long been that if the product is free, you see ads. If you pay, the ads go away. You pay to eliminate ads in Spotify, Candy Crush, or YouTube. If you don’t, you sit through them. There are plenty of reasons to worry about such a framework — targeted advertising is a form of surveillance, and it certainly doesn’t feel great to effectively buy back your own attention with a subscription alternative — but it made sense on its own terms.
It was also, in comparison to older media providers, who had over the years settled on more of an all-of-the-above financial arrangement, sort of refreshing. Paying TV customers still saw ads despite growing bills. Newspaper subscribers still got pitched by businesses trying to steer opinion and sell products between news stories. Here was a new world in which the boundary between paying for a product and being the product was restored, briefly." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/why-every-tech-company-turns-into-an-ad-company.html
#EU#GDPR#SocialMedia#Meta#Facebook#Privacy#TargetedAds#DataProtection: "After more than five years of extensive litigation by noyb, the German Kartellamt and decisions by the EDPB and CJEU it seems that Meta finally complies with EU privacy laws. The company announced it will ask its users for consent before showing behavioral ads in the future. It is uncelar if Meta fully applies the consent requirement. noyb will follow up with litigation if the GDPR is not fully implemented by Meta."
Elon Musk is threatening to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information about its spam bot accounts.