Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The European Union hit Google with a formal antitrust complaint Wednesday, two years after regulators first opened an investigation into whether Google abused its market dominance to favor its own ad tech. Why it matters: The complaint puts even more pressure on Google parent Alphabet to possibly divest parts of its lucrative ad business. In…
Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business. Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through…
As marketers from around the world spend the week in the south of France, the country’s privacy watchdog just sent a strong signal that it’s not taking a laissez-faire approach to digital advertising. On Thursday, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) said it’s issued a €40 million fine against Paris-based ad tech giant…
Advertising industry figures are demanding significant refunds from YouTube following new research that suggests millions of adverts on the video platform are hidden away from users in ways that breach the Google-owned group’s policies. Adalytics, a digital ads analysis group, has conducted research into YouTube’s “TrueView” system, through which the platform’s more than 2bn users…
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names…
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
Media buyers keep insisting that the role of third-party verification firms are critical when assessing everything from brand safety to viewability in the programmatic market. But news publishers feel powerless when their content is misclassified and subsequently demonetized by upwards of 30% compared to inventory deemed as “safe,” according to Luis Romero, svp and head…
PAIR is a new identity solution from Google that allows publishers and advertisers (using Google’s buying platform, DV360) to match first-party data to deliver personalized ads. Google announced PAIR in a blog post outlining the concept last week. PAIR stands for Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, and as far as ad tech acronyms go, it’s not…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
The subject of online anonymity came up at a house party a few weeks back. One of the people there—a friend I’d known for years—said he couldn’t get over the fact that a privacy reporter like me would use their full name on any social site. I told him that hiding behind an online…