Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
How the ad exchanges are sending your money to a very bad man Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Seb Gorka is a neo-Nazi. This is not an opinion or a personal interpretation. It’s a well-documented fact. He has…
You’re reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz become a member. When Lou Montulli invented the cookie in 1994, he was a 23-year-old engineer at Netscape, the company that built one of the internet’s first widely used browsers. He was trying to…
The technology that shaped digital advertising and media is going away. What will replace it? Image copyright: Illustration by Charlie Le Maignan By the digits $336 billion: Valuation of the digital advertising industry, according to one estimate 72%: Americans who worry that what they do online is being tracked by companies 40%-60%: The (rather low)…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
It’s wild how these adtech platforms are violating U.S. sanctions against Russia Placing ads with the enemy Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Two weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury made a very rare move. They announced new sanctions against…
We don’t need to tell you that things are skewing shitty right now. Thanks to the current pandemic, Americans are losing long-loved relatives, , and losing the freedom to do most things . Understandably, plenty of folks are undeniably than they’ve been in recent memory. Another bummer? It turns out that the folks being hit…
A working theory of how major brands ended up in bed with War Room: Pandemic Here’s what’s new with us: How do your ads end up on Steve Bannon’s TV show? Hi folks, Nandini here. Last week, I was checking in on Steve Bannon’s latest media venture War Room: Pandemic when an odd commercial break…