advertising
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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 Real Intention Economy
As a noun phrase, “The intention economy” first appeared in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after that, I wrote this book,… 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
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Why selling personal data is a bad idea
This post is for the benefit of anyone wondering about, researching, or going into business on the proposition that selling one’s own personal data is a good idea. Here are some of my learnings from studying this proposition for the last twenty years or more. The business does exist. See eleven companies in Markets for… Continue reading
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If Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any
In her latest Ars Technica story, Ashley Belanger reports that Patreon, the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative folk, opposes the minimal personal privacy protections provided by a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon, she writes, wants a judge to declare that law (which dates… Continue reading
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Getting Us Wrong
Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called… Continue reading
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Start of an Era
After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until… Continue reading
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Please, United: Don’t Do It.
I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years. Unlike many passengers… Continue reading
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How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?
Eight years ago, I called ad blocking The Biggest Boycott in World History, because hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online. (The headline came from my wife Joyce.) Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic newsletters. So I thought I’d check… Continue reading
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We Need Whole News
Third in the News Commons series. Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.* Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include… Continue reading
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Toward customer boats fishing on a sea of goods and services
I’ll be talking shortly to some readers of The Intention Economy who are looking for ways to connect that economy with advertising. (Or so I gather. I’ll know more soon.) What follows is the gist of what I wrote to them in prep for the call. First, take a look at People vs. Adtech, and/or… Continue reading
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The most important standard in development today
Update on 31 October 2025: P7012 is now nicknamed MyTerms (much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi), and is on track for publication in January 2026. The standard is IEEE P7012: Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read… Continue reading
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Attention is not a commodity
In one of his typically trenchant posts, titled Attentive, Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) compares human attention to oil, meaning an extractive commodity: We used to refer to an information economy. But economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value), and in an age of information abundance, what’s scarce? A: Attention. The scale of the… Continue reading
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The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten… Continue reading
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Where the Intention Economy Beats the Attention Economy
There’s an economic theory here: Free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace. If that’s true, the intention economy will prove it. If not, we’ll stay stuck in the attention economy, where the belief that captive customers are more valuable than free ones prevails. Let… Continue reading
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Redux 002: Listen Up
This is a 1999 post on the (pre-blog) website that introduced my handful of readers to The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just gone up on the Web, and instantly got huge without my help. It was also a dry run for a chapter in the book by the same name, which came out in January, 2000. As best I can recall,… Continue reading
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Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part II
My post yesterday saw action on Techmeme (as I write this, it’s at #2) and on Twitter (from Don Marti, Augustine Fou, et. al.), and in thoughtful blog posts by John Gruber in Daring Fireball and Nick Heer in Pixel Envy. All pushed back on at least some of what I said. Here are some… Continue reading