Site/Blog/Newsletter
FaceBook
Twitter
YouTube
Mastodon

Special Guest: Don Marti.

Support Reality 2.0

Links:

• IAB Tech Lab — Today, IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising technical standards-setting body, announced an update to the widely adopted ads.txt specification which they have opened for public comment for 60 days. The update includes two new values for publishers to declare within their ads.txt files, “ownerdomain” and “managerdomain” which helps  increase the transparency into seller relationships via sellers.json and further strengthens ads.txt as a tool to reduce fraud in buying and selling of advertisements on websites, mobile apps and connected TV.
• IAB Tech Lab — Real-time Bidding (RTB) is a way of selling media that enables an individual advertising opportunity (ad impression) to be put up for bidding in real-time. OpenRTB is the communication protocol that enables real-time bidding. It was designed to spur growth in RTB marketplaces by providing an open industry standard for communication and interoperability between buyers and sellers in the digital advertising industry.
• banning surveillance advertising — New bill in Congress: the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act of 2022. Ambitious goal. May not get far this Congress, but it’s good to have a destination in mind. As Allison Schiff wrote on AdExchanger, Even If Targeted Online Advertising Isn’t Banned – Take Note Of Which Way The Wind Is Blowing. Remember, it took the EPA 23 years to get to the (almost) Final Step in Phaseout of Leaded Gasoline.
• taxing surveillance marketing — Putting a tax on surveillance marketing is sometimes suggested as a solution to a classic externalities problem—firms benefit from surveillance marketing, but the costs and risks are paid for by the people surveilled. A Pigovian tax is the go-to fix for this situation.
• Europe Is Building a Huge International Facial Recognition System | WIRED UK — Lawmakers advance proposals to let police forces across the EU link their photo databases—which include millions of pictures of people’s faces.
• Microtargeting as Information Warfare — F oreign influence operations are an acknowledged threat to national security. Less understood is the data that enables that influence. This article argues that governments must recognize microtargeting—data informed individualized targeted advertising—and the current advertising economy as enabling and profiting from foreign and domestic information warfare being waged on its citizens. The Department of Defense must place greater emphasis on defending servicemembers’ digital privacy as a national security risk. Without the ability to defend this vulnerable attack space, our adversaries will continue to target it for exploitation.

Reality 2.0 around the web:
Site/Blog/Newsletter
FaceBook
Twitter
YouTube
Mastodon

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

Support Reality 2.0

Links:

• Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic): Hwang, Tim: 9780374538651: Amazon.com: Books — In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising―the beating heart of the internet―is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.
• Amazon has a $31 billion a year advertising business — Amazon revealed Thursday just how big its advertising business has become. It generated $31.2 billion in revenue in 2021, with fourth-quarter sales rising 32%, according to the retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings statement.
• Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple — Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.
• A public apology - on screwing up by not questioning assumptions - my talk at #BIF10 - Ethan Zuckerman — About a month ago, I wrote an article about a simple idea. I asked whether anyone really believed that advertising should be the main way we supported content and services on the internet. Given how poorly banner advertising on the web worksGiven that nobody likes banner ads, and given that the current system puts users under surveillance, which in turn seems to inure us to government surveillance, I wondered whether there might be a better way.
• Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him. The sound track is “Mind Your Own Business,” by Delta 5.
• Fighting FLoC and Fighting Monopoly Are Fully Compatible | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?
• Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will cost $10 billion this year — Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion.
• Google Drops FLoC and Introduces Topics API to Replace Tracking Cookies for Ads — Google on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for replacing third-party cookies in favor of a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics, which categorizes users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. The new mechanism, which takes the place of FLoC (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts), slots users' browsing history for a given week into a handful of top pre-designated interests (i.e., topics), which are retained only on the device for a revolving period of three weeks.
• GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe's consent popups are unlawful - Irish Council for Civil Liberties — Google, Amazon, and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal following complaints coordinated by ICCL.  EU data protection authorities find that the consent popups that plagued Europeans for years are illegal. All data collected through them must be deleted. This decision impacts Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses.
• Case number: DOS-2019-01377 Concerning: Complaint relating to Transparency & Consent Framework

Show Notes:

00:02:17 Page Xray and Blacklight
00:07:27 While you interact with one web page, who else is harvesting your information?
00:14:13 Listen to which tracker Katherine used for about 10 minute, and promptly removed!
00:15:57 What is malvertising
00:18:55 What about the browser extension privacy trackers?
00:25:54 Who should use PageXray?
00:32:30 What are some good consumer tools?
00:42:26 What is "fingerprinting" and how does a site "fingerprint" you?
00:48:21 Covering your "privates"
00:51:32 Marketers are chasing the shiny object called Digital
00:53:26 what is the ratio of registered domains vs websites vs humans visitors vs real ad impressions?

Special Guest: Dr. Augustine Fou.

Support Reality 2.0

Links:

• Episode 13: Surveillance Marketing — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about surveillance marketing, ad tech, and privacy.
• Page X-Ray Data Privacy Analysis Featured in Episode 43 — A brief overview of Page X-Ray.
• FouAnalytics - Ads By Domain — Privacy Analytics tool from Dr. Augustine Fou.
• Blacklight – The Markup — A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector
• Privacy Badger — Privacy extension from the EFF.
• Ghostery: Online Privacy Made Easy — Ghostery demystifies online privacy by exposing the forces that lurk behind your screen and enabling you to block them.
• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — The Brave browser.