Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Credit…Illustration by Derek Brahney May 9, 2017 Recently I handed over the keys to my email account to a service that promised to turn my spam-bloated inbox into a sparkling model of efficiency in just a few clicks. Unroll.me’s method of instant unsubscribing from newsletters and junk mail was “trusted by millions of happy users,”…
Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy. In 1969, a woman named Barbara James walked into a neighborhood legal services office in New York City in search of help to fight the city’s home visit policy. Her case…
A test by Walgreens of technology that replaced some cooler doors with digital screens that play ads has ended in acrimony. The digital screens’ vendor, Cooler Screens, is suing the pharmacy chain, saying that Walgreens obstructed an agreed-upon nationwide rollout of the internet-connected doors and demanded their removal from stores, according to court documents….
There’s a new power player on America’s extremist scene. White nationalist “Active Clubs” are growing explosively, and filling a void created by the prosecutions that decimated the leadership of Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. “The Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys thought they were,” says John Lewis, a research fellow at the Program…
One of the top takeaways from this year’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Key Biscayne, Fla. was that while ad revenue is starting to flow back into the market, advertisers are asking for more proof that they’re going to get a return on their investment from their publisher partners. Between the on stage sessions and the…
In June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments…
Ad fraud will cost marketers $84 billion this year – 22% of all online ad spend. This figure is expected to soar to $170 billion in five years’ time in 2028, according to a new in-depth study from Juniper Research. Why we care. Ad fraud could be costing your brand money, hurting campaign results, leaving…
Pluralistic: The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline (29 Sept 2023) Today’s links The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline: Finding suckers is the one thing ad-targeting is good at. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current…
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and…
Over the years advances in AI have enhanced our products, benefiting the people who use them, web content creators, and the overall web ecosystem. The rapid growth and development of generative AI tools is helping web publishers connect with their audiences more easily and creatively than ever before. We’re committed to developing AI responsibly, guided…