Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
TikTok quietly updated its earlier this week in a way that allows the company to automatically collect extensive data on users in the United States —including data about their faces and their voice . The policy change, first spotted by , specifically states that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under…
How the ad exchanges are sending your money to a very bad man Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Seb Gorka is a neo-Nazi. This is not an opinion or a personal interpretation. It’s a well-documented fact. He has…
You’re reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz become a member. When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to…
The technology that shaped digital advertising and media is going away. What will replace it? Image copyright: Illustration by Charlie Le Maignan By the digits $336 billion: Valuation of the digital advertising industry, according to one estimate 72%: Americans who worry that what they do online is being tracked by companies 40%-60%: The (rather low)…
You’re reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz become a member. Table of contents Nothing on the internet is free | Glossary | What is a third-party cookie? | Timeline | Why are third-party cookies going away? | What will replace third-party…
Yahoo Answers is not what most people would call a good source of information. On Monday morning, the top questions on its homepage, as decided by its users, included whether the Democratic Party would eventually initiate some kind of genocide, whether Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were really in love, why small dogs were “the…
This article is part of the Digiday Privacy Preview, a digital issue of stories examining what the coming changes to Chrome and iOS will do to the worlds of media and marketing. Read the rest of that coverage here. More than $10 billion worth of digital ad revenue rides on the media industry’s ability to figure…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…