Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
James Rosewell could see his company’s future was in jeopardy. It was January 2020, and Google had just announced key details of its plan to increase privacy in its Chrome browser by getting rid of third-party cookies and essentially breaking the tools that businesses use to track people across the web. That includes businesses like…
How the ad exchanges are sending your money to a very bad man Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Seb Gorka is a neo-Nazi. This is not an opinion or a personal interpretation. It’s a well-documented fact. He has…
You’re reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz become a member. When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to…
The technology that shaped digital advertising and media is going away. What will replace it? Image copyright: Illustration by Charlie Le Maignan By the digits $336 billion: Valuation of the digital advertising industry, according to one estimate 72%: Americans who worry that what they do online is being tracked by companies 40%-60%: The (rather low)…
You’re reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz become a member. Table of contents Nothing on the internet is free | Glossary | What is a third-party cookie? | Timeline | Why are third-party cookies going away? | What will replace third-party…
This article is part of the Digiday Privacy Preview, a digital issue of stories examining what the coming changes to Chrome and iOS will do to the worlds of media and marketing. Read the rest of that coverage here. More than $10 billion worth of digital ad revenue rides on the media industry’s ability to figure…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…