You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook. – WSJ

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is…

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One Man’s Obsessive Fight to Reclaim His Cambridge Analytica Data | WIRED

It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…

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The Washington Post’s Aram Zucker-Scharff: You can’t solve transparency by adding more technology – Digiday

Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Anchor For many, digital media’s ills are down to broken ad tech and the system propping it up. Adam Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech at the Washington Post, says it’s more complicated than simply fixing the plumbing: Advertisers are going to have to work at making ad…

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Playable Ads Engage Users Beyond Gaming – eMarketer Trends, Forecasts & Statistics – eMarketer Trends, Forecasts & Statistics

Google’s AdMob launched playable ads for their gaming partners last May, and Facebook launched them in August. In both cases, the ads were mostly used by game developers, but playable ads have potential for other industries. “It’s leveraging the fact that users like to play games,” said Ari Brandt, executive vice president of strategic development…

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‘It’s hurting us’: Confessions of an ad tech exec on GDPR consent-string fraud – Digiday

Three months ago, four ad tech vendors flagged that they had identified fake consent strings. Consent strings are generated by a publisher’s consent management platform and passed back to all that publisher’s digital ad partners to show which impressions have user consent for personalized advertising, and which don’t. It seems the issue hasn’t gone away. For…

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Guide to Advertising Technology – Columbia Journalism Review

Executive Summary Advertising technology has built a massive technical infrastructure. The technology and motivations of advertising undergird the economy of the internet. News sites are no exception. The information we seek about our world is underpinned with, and shaped by, advertising and its needs. Journalists need to know more about these technologies, how they work,…

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