Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This is a post about journalism, privacy, and the common assumption that we can’t have one without sacrificing at least some of the other, because (the assumption goes), the business model for journalism is tracking-based advertising, aka adtech. I’ve been fighting that assumption for a long time. People vs. Adtech is a collection of 129 pieces…
Mobile advertising is big business, and where money flows, fraudsters follow. Last year, advertisers spent over $327 billion targeting users as they engaged with popular mobile apps, but as HUMAN Security announced yesterday, a chunk of that spending went into the pockets of fraudsters who successfully launched a massive ad fraud scheme. HUMAN discovered the…
Over the course of his life, Alejo Lopez de Armentia has played video games for a variety of reasons. There was the thrill of competition, the desire for companionship, and, at base, the need to pass the time. In his 20s, feeling isolated while working for a solar panel company in Florida, he spent his…
The Edited Latecomer’s Guide To Crypto Annotations by Molly White, Matt Binder, Grady Booch, Amy Castor, Stephen Diehl, Dirty Bubble Media, Dr. Catherine Flick, David Gerard, Geoffrey Huntley, Bennett Tomlin, Neil Turkewitz, Ed Zitron, and some anonymous contributors. Published March 25, 2022. On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff…
Given the company’s character and scale and long ethical rap sheet, it is reasonable to construe every message issued by the company formerly known as Facebook as a threat. The company surely doesn’t intend this, but the story of the company’s growth and success has by now been overtaken by the sum of the many,…
Who doesn’t love a good funnel? Today, we’re going to make a nice colorful funnel using the latest data from some of the ad industry’s most reliable sources to trace a dollar spent for programmatically-bought display advertising on its exciting journey from your pocket to the bank accounts of middlemen, con men, crooks, and the Bermuda…
Hack the SEC A good plot for, like, an insider-trading Hollywood thriller would be if the villains hacked into the computers of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, after all, is maybe the world’s greatest repository of material information about public companies. Companies are constantly filing earnings releases, merger announcements, management changes, proxy…
BuzzFeed’s four-year-old programmatic business is the engine of its advertising growth. That muscle will come in handy as publishers and marketers enter the usual frenzy of the fourth quarter against the backdrop of the delta variant threatening to derail ad creative and campaign budgets. On its road to becoming a public company, the publisher wouldn’t…
For the Tech Policy Press Sunday Show podcast, I spoke to author Carissa Véliz about her recently published book, Privacy is Power: Why And How you Should Take Back Control of Your Data. Carissa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…