Business
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Dear @WashingtonPost
This is wrong: Because I’m not blocking ads. I’m blocking tracking. In fact I welcome ads—especially ones that sponsor The Washington Post and other fine publishers. I’ll also be glad to subscribe to the Post once it stops trying to track me off their site. Same goes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal… Continue reading
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Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide?
The answer is, we don’t know. Also, we may never know, because— It’s too hard to measure (especially if you’re talking about the entire Net). Too so much of the usage is in mobile devices of too many different kinds. The browser makers are approaching ad blocking and tracking protection in different and new ways… Continue reading
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The Spinner’s hack on journalism
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person. It works like this: You pay The Spinner* $29. For example, to urge a friend to… Continue reading
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On Amazon, New York, New Jersey and urban planning
In a press release, Amazon explained why it backed out of its plan to open a new headquarters in New York City: For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New… Continue reading
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On renting cars
I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now… Continue reading
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Google vs. Bing
In search, Google has a 90%+ share worldwide. But I’m not sure that makes it a monopoly, as long as it has real competition. With Bing is does. For example, recently I wanted to find a post Andrew Orlowski wrote for The Register in the early 00s. I remembered that it was about The Cluetrain Manifesto (which… Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in… Continue reading
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A helpful approach to personal data protection regulation
Enforcing Data Protection: A Model for Risk-Based Supervision Using Responsive Regulatory Tools, a post by Dvara Research, summarizes Effective Enforcement of a Data Protection Regime, a deeply thought and researched paper by Beni Chugh (@BeniChugh), Malavika Raghavan (@teninthemorning), Nishanth Kumar (@beamboybeamboy) and Sansiddha Pani (@julupani). While it addresses proximal concerns in India, it provides useful guidance for… Continue reading
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What’s wrong with bots is they’re not ours
In Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?, Justin Lee (@justinleejw) nicely unpacks how chatbots were overhyped to begin with and continue to fail their Turing tests, especially since humans in nearly all cases would rather talk to humans than to mechanical substitutes. There’s also a bigger and more fundamental reason why bots still aren’t… Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process. One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the… Continue reading
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For privacy we need tech more than policy
To get real privacy in the online world, we need to get the tech horse in front of the policy cart. So far we haven’t done that. Let me explain… Nature and the Internet both came without privacy. The difference is that we’ve invented privacy tech in the natural world, starting with clothing and shelter,… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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A Qualified Fail
Power of the People is a great grabber of a headline, at least for me. But it’s a pitch for a report that requires filling out the form here on the right: You see a lot of these: invitations to put one’s digital ass on mailing list, just to get a report that should have… Continue reading
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Requiem for a great magazine
Linux Journal is folding. Carlie Fairchild, who has run the magazine almost since it started in 1994, posted Linux Journal Ceases Publication today on the website. So far all of the comments have been positive, which they should be. Throughout its life, Linux Journal has been about as valuable as a trade pub can be,… Continue reading
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Boston is the Top Radio Market for Sports
So I did some research, and Boston wins, big: Boston 11.0 Philadelphia 8.7 Minneapolis-St.Paul 6.9 Detroit 6.4 Middlesex-Somerset-Union, NJ 6.4 Oklahoma City 6.2 Baltimore 6.1 Nashville 5.9 New York 5.8 Pittsburgh 5.8 Kansas City 5.8 Dallas-Fort Worth 5.7 Nassau-Suffolk, NY 5.5 Chicago 5.4 San Francisco 5.4 Columbus 5.4 Atlanta 4.9 Denver 4.7 Washington DC 4.3… Continue reading
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Let’s get some things straight about publishing and advertising
Synopsis—Advertising supported publishing in the offline world by sponsoring it. In the online world, advertising has been body-snatched by adtech, which tracks eyeballs via files injected into apps and browsers, then shoots those eyeballs with “relevant” ads wherever the eyeballs show up. Adtech has little or no interest in sponsoring a pub for the pub’s… Continue reading
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How the personal data extraction industry ends
Who Owns the Internet? — What Big Tech’s Monopoly Powers Mean for our Culture is Elizabeth Kolbert‘s review in The New Yorker of several books, one of which I’ve read: Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. The main takeaway for me, to both Elizabeth’s piece and Jon’s… Continue reading
adtech, advertising, Business, data, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, Law, marketing, News, Technology, VRM -
Dear Apple, please make exporting “unmodified originals” easier. Thanks.
23 February 2023—I just noticed for the first time that dragging and dropping photos from the Photos app into a directory (folder) on my Mac now retains EXIF data. If I right click on a photo exported that way, the displayed exif data is no different than the data in a file exported as an… Continue reading