Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
If you still hold any notion that Google Chrome’s “Incognito mode” is a good way to protect your privacy online, now’s a good time to stop. Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San…
Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools. Bots like Common Crawl are scraping and storing billions of pages of content for AI training. With less incentive to share online freely, the web could become a series of paywalled gardens. AI is undermining the…
One month after the publication of a hotly contested report on the transparency of media buys on YouTube, advertisers are probing the industry’s largest seller of online ad space for better answers. The controversy sprang from a report by research firm Adalytics which claimed that marketers buying ad space on YouTube are potentially vulnerable to…
The world of digital ads is reeling after a bombshell report that found Google’s video advertising system may be defrauding customers 80% of the time, violating the promises the company makes to advertisers about where and how those ads are shown. Some advertisers are demanding refunds, which, theoretically, would cost Google millions if not billions…
The European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation on Tuesday into whether Google has abused its market position by favoring its own online display advertising technology. Why it matters: The probe will target parts of Google’s massive $147 billion annual ads business that have never been investigated formally by regulators, including ways its advertising practices…
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…
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…
TikTok quietly updated its earlier this week in a way that allows the company to automatically collect extensive data on users in the United States —including data about their faces and their voice . The policy change, first spotted by , specifically states that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under…
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…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…