Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
These Fortune 500 keyword blocklists are defunding the news This unprecedented leak by Integral Ad Science shows us the news stories the world’s biggest companies refuse to fund — and it gets weird. Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us:…
.entry-header In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation. I argued that they absolutely should in this Daily Update…
Among all of the antitrust probes facing Google right now, the case dropped on Wednesday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stands out for a few reasons. First, it focuses on the tech giant’s dominance in digital ads, rather than focusing on search the way that the Justice Department and more than 30 states have…
Advertisers’ attempts to break down data’s walled gardens have found a second wind. The emergence of so-called data clean rooms, safe spaces where insights gleaned from the walled gardens are commingled with first-party data from advertisers for measurement and attribution, is gathering pace as media trading becomes more addressable. As much as these safe spaces…
Facebook is no stranger to climate misinformation. Just last month, the platform became a key player in spreading surrounding the wildfires raging across the West Coast to an audience of tens of thousands, taking them down only after public outrage. And last year when activists that climate misinformation seemed to be exempt from the platform’s…
While I think we can all agree that every app on our phone is probably an invasive little shit, I’d argue that weather apps deserve their own little corner in hell. We’ve seen weather apps sign folks up for services without their say-so, sneakily get location data from users who deliberately turned that function off,…
Android screenshots of the app Honey Quest, which uses technology that keeps tabs on the viewing habits of its users. At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like “Pool 3D,” “Beer Pong: Trickshot” and “Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin” — seem innocuous. One called “Honey Quest” features Jumbo, an animated bear. Yet these…
For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine, while…
Right now, there’s a good chance your digital life is multitudes bigger than it was just a few months ago. Over time, the global coronavirus pandemic has turned a lot of us—or at least everyone I know—into the type of person who , , and attends everything from to behind some sort of screen. There’s…
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…