adtech
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Dues Day
Currently I have three of them. Do you have a principle? I hadn’t thought about that before reading Justin Mikolay‘s Inventing on Principle: A Distillation of Bret Victor’s Extraordinary Talk About How To Live Your Life. And that’s just one of many things that have been written about Bret Victor, a guy about whom I knew… Continue reading
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Endweek
Make America Grate Again Yesterday's depressing news was Trump's latest attempted slaying of the Hudson Tunnel Project, which may be more expensive to shut own than to complete. But that's just my off-the-wall take. The real story is far more complicated. Today's depressing news is the end of the CIA World Factbook, one of the… Continue reading
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Warm Takes
We still await truly personal AI. Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.” That should be called personalized, because… Continue reading
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Dept. of Overstate
Pull almost-quote: Never mistake malice for stupidity Says here that 4% support for the U.S. taking over Greenland is in the lizardman range. When will he come to the US? Peter Bence is an amazing pianist. Made it a bit punchier I just gave The Only Way to Get Privacy Online a fresh edit, based on… Continue reading
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Securing the right to be let alone
In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argues that demolition of personal privacy began in the postwar years and became normative in 1973. That was when PBS ran An American Family: a cinéma verité exposure of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, and the inaugural example of… Continue reading
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Everwhen
Same cancer, different tumor Show of hands: Who wants surveillance pricing? Sez Wikipedia, at that link, “Surveillance pricing is a form of dynamic pricing where a consumer’s personal data and behavior is used to determine their willingness to pay.[1] This form of price discrimination assesses price sensitivity for a products or services based on an… Continue reading
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On extracting yourself from the extractors
Here’s the flyer for the next talk in our salon series here at Indiana University: Elettra is one of the most interesting, smart, accomplished, caring, and effective people I know. She is also all of those in English, French, Italian, and German. I met her through our overlapping work around the Berkman Klein Center at… Continue reading
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Toward giving future thanks
The puppet is not human and doesn't work for you Just a question: Can Big Ai make more money selling your brain to advertisers than the surveillance-based adtech fecosystem does now? I suspect both OpenAI and Google believe the answer is yes. Along those same lines, Ted Gioia reminds us that Big AI is already our… Continue reading
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Sun Day
Dawn in Southern Indiana, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. And Hoosiers football remains amazing. Wait, LeBron was in the G League? Am I alone in (unfairly) discounting posts and emails that include AI chatbot text and art? Doesn’t matter how good it is (and some of it is damned good), I get turned… Continue reading
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Questions
What does the Internet make of us? was hard to find until I found it. Now it’s easy to find. What did Google learn, and how did it learn it? The law professors to whom I made The Case for MyTerms two weeks ago seemed to buy it. What, if anything, will happen next? When I read The… Continue reading
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A Cure for Corporate Addiction to Personal Data
I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read… Continue reading
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Friday, July 4th, 2025
A big value-substract for higher ed. Among the crowning distinctions of Indiana University are its international scope and many supported disciplines. (An example.) Now, reports Inside Higher Ed, "Indiana’s public higher education institutions plan to eliminate or consolidate over 400 programs, equaling roughly one-fifth of their degree offerings statewide, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education… Continue reading
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Friday, June 27, 2025
Modest ambitions. I’ll be on the Immergence podcast (above) this coming Tuesday, July 1, at Noon Eastern time, talking with Nico Fara about The Intention Economy, ProjectVRM, Customer Commons, Personal AI, and using MyTerms to completely flip the script on agreements with websites and services, obsolescing all those annoying cookie notices—and blowing up surveillance-based adtech… Continue reading
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We’ve Had Enough of This Shit
I was going to source this Bloomberg story about AI-related Microsoft Layoffs, but the interruptive popover said, I didn’t accept that, and suggest you don’t either. I just checked in another browser, and in Europe (or at least in The Netherlands, where I am VPN’d right now), Bloomberg gives you these choices: That’s because Bloomberg tries… Continue reading
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Friday, 20 June 2025
Convenient. The 50 Best Restaurants include: Six in Bangkok Five in Tokyo. Four in Paris. Four in Lima. Four in Copenhagen. Three in New York. Two in Munich. Two in London. Two in Mexico City . Two in Dubai. Two in Seoul. Two in Barcelona. One in Gardone Riviera. One in Alba. One in Singapore.… Continue reading
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Did tracking-based advertising just get blown up in Europe?
As I read it (in an English translation here), an appeals court in Brussels ruled consent notifications on websites illegal (or close enough) in the EU. Your interpretation may vary. Here are some sources I’ve gathered to help with that: Jamie Smith: Targeting ads using Real Time Bidding is now illegal, and how will we know… Continue reading
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Sunday, 15 June 2025
Show me where “your privacy choices” are kept, and how compliance can be audited, and I might believe corporate promises. On our Apple TV 4k box, an app for a subscription service (e.g. Netflix, Prime, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Haystack, whatever) usually opens with a message that gives one the choice to “Ask app not… Continue reading
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Gleanings
But that’s the idea, right? Lucas Ropek in Gizmodo: Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users: The advertising industry is immensely powerful and disturbingly opaque. Read it. Then look at a PageXray of that same story to see how much tracking Gizmodo does, and how deeply embedded it is in that same… Continue reading
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It’s still adtech
This morning Wired published This Ad-Tech Company Is Powering Surveillance of US Military Personnel. It’s a good piece, which is typical of Wired lately. But what caught my eye was “Ad-Tech” in the headline. Some writers say “ad tech.” Others say “adtech” or “AdTech.” I’m highly leveraged in “adtech,” since I’ve now posted 160 pieces (including… Continue reading
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The Kraken Won
Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakraken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company. What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not… Continue reading