Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
It’s wild how these adtech platforms are violating U.S. sanctions against Russia Placing ads with the enemy Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Two weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury made a very rare move. They announced new sanctions against…
Screenshot the from “Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative Memorandum” You have probably heard it said that bitcoin is really bad for the environment. You might have heard it said that mining it — ie the computer processing that is required to produce new “coins” — is more energy-intensive than [insert increasingly large nation state]. It’s one…
We don’t need to tell you that things are skewing shitty right now. Thanks to the current pandemic, Americans are losing long-loved relatives, , and losing the freedom to do most things . Understandably, plenty of folks are undeniably than they’ve been in recent memory. Another bummer? It turns out that the folks being hit…
A working theory of how major brands ended up in bed with War Room: Pandemic Here’s what’s new with us: How do your ads end up on Steve Bannon’s TV show? Hi folks, Nandini here. Last week, I was checking in on Steve Bannon’s latest media venture War Room: Pandemic when an odd commercial break…
Heads up, fellow T-Mobile customers: You might want to take a look at your mobile carrier’s privacy policy. As by the Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest update to its privacy policy is set to automatically enroll paying phone subscribers into an ad-targeting program that will see their data shared with unnumbered advertisers starting next…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…
We just think we are. A few days after the January 6th insurrection, shareholders at two major companies filed a resolution asking that Home Depot and Omnicom undertake audits to prove that their ad budgets haven’t been funding disinformation and extremism online. This, as far as we know, is the first time the link between…
Facebook, which along with Google accounts for around 60% of advertiser spending online, has knowingly built some of its astonishing success on incorrect data, newly unsealed court documents allege. Incidentally, this may pose a problem for a business which generates of its revenue from selling ads. In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was…
On Monday, Google released a few more details on its proposed tracking alternative to third-party cookies, a “privacy-first” technology that, from any angle, seems like just another way for the company to maintain its stranglehold on digital ad sales. Google’s calls its new creation “Federated Learning of Cohorts” (FLoC, for short), and promises that it’s…