#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
@aral
The most irksome part of this banner is the assumption, “We know…” How dare they presume to know my ethics and values? … Unless, of course, they’ve purchased my profile from Google, Meta, data brokers, or all the assorted twatwaddle purveyors of #surveillancecapitalism & #adtech…
Whenever you see the words “ads”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “web 3”, or “AI”, just replace them with “farts” and you’ll know whether you want them or not.
“Can the fediverse survive without farts?”
Yes, perfectly well.
“Will farts replace people?”
I hope not.
“The European Commission embraces farts.”
That’s unfortunate.
“This new startup wants to improve your life with farts.”
Manchmal hilft es ja, einfach mal ins Fediverse hinein zu fragen:
Hi, arbeitest du mit Werbe-Segmenten in der #AdTech-Industrie und hättest Interesse, mit mir darüber zu sprechen? Mich interessieren besonders ein paar Werbe-Segmente, die wir in einem größeren Datensatz entdeckt haben, vor dem Hintergrund der #DSGVO. Du müsstest auch nicht namentlich in einem möglichen Bericht auftauchen.
Today in #SurveillanceCapitalism I went to acquire snacks and there were two of these #DOOH#DigitalSignage screens at the entrance. That circle at the top is a camera, I think.
The really weird thing is that it served me an ad for a Google Pixel as I approached it. It was serving a Bendigo Bank ad. There are no signs anywhere stating if this is using facial rec or beacons or other #AdTech. I am curious if it's doing age / gender classification from the camera.
Would love to see what my #FlipperZero can make of this.
#OpenAccess#Adtech#Marketing#USA#Surveillance: "How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.
Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.
To help make sense of today's attention merchants and choice architects, McGuigan explores a few key questions: How did technical experts working at the intersection of data processing and management sciences come to command the center of gravity in the advertising and media industries? How did their ambition to remake marketing through mathematical optimization shape and reflect developments in digital technology? In short, where did adtech come from, and how did data-driven marketing come to mediate the daily encounters of people, products, and public spheres? His answers show how the advertising industry's efforts to bend information technologies toward its dream of efficiency and rational management helped to make "surveillance capitalism" one of the defining experiences of public life."
"Ad blockers are unethical—ads are how they pay to keep the lights on!”
Exactly. It's how THEY pay to keep the lights on. It's not how I pay for anything. I didn't agree to see ads, although I'm ok with some ads; what I definitely didn't do is agree to be tracked and profiled and have arbitrary third-party code running on my computer just so I could read this awful, pointless, SEO-ified shitfest of an article that doesn't come close to answering the question I was googling.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, then the purpose of #adtech is to trick legit advertisers into sponsoring sites that they would never intentionally run on
#Norway#SocialMedia#Facebook#Instagram#Meta#AdTech#BehaviouralAdvertising: "The Meta-owned social media platforms will face a temporary three-month ban on behavioural advertising based on extensive user profiling in Norway starting on 4 August, following a ruling of the EU Court of Justice that found the practice lacked a legal basis.
Although Facebook and Instagram will continue their operations in the country, behavioural advertising infringing the EU regulation on data protection is banned. The penalty is 1 million Norwegian kroner (almost €89,000) daily.
The General Data Protection Regulation applies to all 27 member states of the EU, plus the three additional countries of the European Economic Area: Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway."
#EU#AdTech#AdTargeting#Surveillance#SurveillanceCapitalism: "Everything we do on the Internet is being recorded and analyzed in order to achieve one goal: to show us targeted advertising. This is a reality to which many people have become accustomed in exchange for free services. However, very few people understand exactly where our data ends up when we visit websites, use apps or make digital payments. Targeted advertising moves in mysterious ways. That’s another fact we’ve become accustomed to.
An investigation by netzpolitik.org is set to change this fundamental imbalance between the adtech industry and internet users. In June, we published a series of articles shining a light on the collection, trade and use of personal data in the global adtech industry. We analyzed an inventory file from a US-based data marketplace called Xandr. The file contains more than 650,000 so-called audience segments. These are used by advertising companies to categorize and target billions of people.
The scope and detail of this data collection is staggering. There is hardly a human characteristic that advertisers do not want to exploit for their purposes. Want to reach people in Denmark who have bought a Toyota? No problem. Italians with financial problems? No problem. Minors in Austria? Hardcore Christians in Portugal? Pregnant women in Poland? Fragile seniors in France? Queers in Spain? No problem."
New: The #adtech industry has over 650k labels to target you. Reading them reveals how even the most sensitive aspects of our life are monitored: app & web usage, offline location, purchases, character traits, health, …
We identified over a dozen data brokers from EU countries incl DE, FR, ES, IT, NL that trade personal data of Europeans.
Not sure the panel recording will be public, so here are my notes in a long 🧵 thread:
▶️ The DSA is rather good at respecting #freedom of expression, it gives platforms some new tools to carefully consider and improve their moderation practices and users to defend their rights. [1/8]
▶️ The real problem is the staggering dependency of online #journalism on corporate social media platforms to reach their audience and the loss of massive amounts of ad revenue that is sucked up by #adtech middlemen for supposedly well-targeted #tracking#advertising. It’s the classic #gatekeeper problem: The harms inflicted by these gatekeepers to our attention can be directly measured by the loss in independence of—and income for—the very same #FreePress that #EMFA is supposed to protect. [5/8]
Saving the news from Big Tech - https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187 the only solution is to move to contextual advertising, which worked for over a century before #adtech came along, and will work in the online world too
#EU#Cookies#AdTech#DataProtection#Privacy: "The initiative is meant to explore alternative ways for users to consent to the processing of their personal data for the purpose of online advertising whilst also allowing consumers to make an informed choice, increasing transparency on the underlying business model.
The first stakeholder roundtable took place on 28 April, when attendees were divided into three working groups concerning the information to be provided to consumers, the alternatives to tracking-based advertising and user-controlled solutions for ad personalisation.
Last Thursday (15 June), the European Commission shared draft notes, seen by EURACTIV, with participants of the three working groups with some initial pledges and points for discussion. Stakeholders have been requested to provide their written inputs this week."
No, #USAToday. Iʼm not using an #ad blocker. You are. I only block trackers. If your ad tech is so terrible that you would rather do yourself out of money when you canʼt plant trackers, then Iʼm not the one harming your revenues. Same goes for a lot of other publications. Media, support yourselves by turning off your ad blockers, and stop blaming your readers for your own bad decisions. #advertising#media#adtech
1/2
Das 40,00€ teurer gewordene Nachfolgeticket zum 9-Euro-Ticket soll Daten melken. Zwar solle das Ticket übergangsweise nicht nur für Smartphones erhältlich sein sondern auch auf Chip-Karten und kurzzeitig auf Papier mit QR-Code, aber wichtig scheint es den Regierenden vor allem anderen, dass mit dem 49€-Ticket Echtzeit-Verkehrsdaten erhoben werden können.
Positiv klingt zunächst: "Es werde nicht gespeichert, wer von A nach B fährt, sondern nur, wie stark die Verkehrsmittel ausgelastet sind. Für die Fahrgäste könnte das ein Nutzen sein, weil die Verkehrsunternehmen so für ausreichend Kapazitäten sorgen könnten."
Allerdings: Das Ticket wird wohl nur als Abo personalisiert erworben werden können, so dass darüber anfallende Personendaten zukünftig schnell integriert werden könnten. Mit Hinblick auf den aktuellen massiven Ausbau des Überwachungsstaats und der Kontrollgesellschaft in Deutschland und der EU (digitale Personenkennziffer/RegMod, Chatkontrolle, Identifizierungspflicht, Biometrie, eIDAS uvm) ist es doch auch gar nicht die Frage ob, sondern nur wann und mit welchem Vorwand (Anschläge, Pandemie, Jugendschutz, Wahlkampf) personalisierte Datenerfassung und Polizeizugriffe kommen werden, sobald die digitale Kontrollinfrastruktur erst einmal errichtet wurde.