Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In August 2017, the FBI organized a secret meeting of digital advertising and cybersecurity experts in a secure room in a Manhattan federal building. The roughly 30 people in attendance met to create a coordinated response to a massive ad fraud scheme that posed a risk to the global digital advertising industry and sparked a…
Mozilla’s user research, and research conducted by universities and independent experts, consistently shows that most people who use the web do not approve of many of the ways in which their personal data is collected and shared for targeted advertising. In fact, people consider some practices to be invasive, creepy, and even scary. User tracking…
If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately—and making it easy…
Jihadi rapists. Muslim invaders. Faked mass shootings. Pizzagate. Somebody browsing highly partisan websites in recent weeks could have seen articles about all of these subjects — and on the same pages seen cheerful green ads for the Girl Scouts, bearing the slogan “Helping Girls Change the World!” Such juxtapositions, documented by a Washington Post review…
The U.S. digital ad market grew by nearly $12 billion last year, with Google and Facebook collecting 77 cents of each new dollar spent, according to eMarketer. Peter and Maria Hoey June 19, 2017 5:30 a.m. ET Facebook Inc. FB -2.59% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -0.02% Google tower so far above the rest of the…
Dublin, Ireland and London, United Kingdom, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 — Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale…
.entry-meta .entry-header This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from time to time something bothers me enough that I have to make an exception. Today I wanted to write specifically about…
It’s no secret that mobile ad fraud is a m assive problem. Less clear are the specific channels and brands being impacted, and to what degree. This past week, the ad fraud specialists at Pixalate helped me see this space with a bit more precision: For example, the firm finds that unfiltered invalid traffic (IVT)…
In a recent article in AdWeek, Forensiq shared findings that 1,400 mobile apps loaded ads while under the guise of TV Guide’s domain. That raised a lot of eyebrows across the industry, particularly since the vaunted Ads.txt was supposed to put an end to such domain-spoofing tomfoolery. Forensiq suggested that those 1,400 apps were only…
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into media trading and transparency in the US advertising market. Campaign has learned from multiple sources that representatives from the FBI have been contacting people with knowledge of the ad industry and asking for their help in recent months. It is thought that the FBI, the law enforcement…