Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
New York is prohibiting advertisers from geofencing health care facilities, according to a new provision in the state budget passed in May. As a result, it’s becoming harder for advertisers, who want to use location or health care data, to maintain performance while still abiding by the law. Geofencing is a technology that lets companies…
Brands like Chick-Fil-A and Geico are being accused of violating 1980s privacy law the VPPA. Companies that use online tracking codes like Meta Pixel or Google Analytics are potentially at risk. It can cost companies millions of dollars to resolve these cases. Broadcasters have long been wary of running afoul of a 1988 privacy law…
The United States has no national privacy law. What it has instead is a laissez-faire policy that allows businesses and governments to harvest all manner of data and use it in any way they choose. While many Americans are aware of the harm caused by social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they are generally…
Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools. Bots like Common Crawl are scraping and storing billions of pages of content for AI training. With less incentive to share online freely, the web could become a series of paywalled gardens. AI is undermining the…
Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny. The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn. The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess…
One month after the publication of a hotly contested report on the transparency of media buys on YouTube, advertisers are probing the industry’s largest seller of online ad space for better answers. The controversy sprang from a report by research firm Adalytics which claimed that marketers buying ad space on YouTube are potentially vulnerable to…
By now, most people working in advertising have heard about the recent YouTube scandal. A comprehensive report from measurement company Adalytics provides a long list of cases where TrueView ads didn’t seem to adhere to Google’s quality standards. Ads were served on third-party sites and apps via the YouTube partner network, known as GVP. Many…
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est…
Movie studios favoring familiarity and profitability over artistry is nothing new or particularly innovative. At the moment, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike against Hollywood’s profit-driven and margin-squeezing madness, throwing the craven greed of the executive class into even sharper…
The world of digital ads is reeling after a bombshell report that found Google’s video advertising system may be defrauding customers 80% of the time, violating the promises the company makes to advertisers about where and how those ads are shown. Some advertisers are demanding refunds, which, theoretically, would cost Google millions if not billions…