Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The news-rating group NewsGuard has found dozens of news websites generated by AI chatbots proliferating online, according to a report published Monday, raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques. The 49 websites, which were independently reviewed by Bloomberg, run the gamut. Some are dressed up as breaking news sites with generic-sounding names…
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
Media buyers keep insisting that the role of third-party verification firms are critical when assessing everything from brand safety to viewability in the programmatic market. But news publishers feel powerless when their content is misclassified and subsequently demonetized by upwards of 30% compared to inventory deemed as “safe,” according to Luis Romero, svp and head…
PAIR is a new identity solution from Google that allows publishers and advertisers (using Google’s buying platform, DV360) to match first-party data to deliver personalized ads. Google announced PAIR in a blog post outlining the concept last week. PAIR stands for Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation, and as far as ad tech acronyms go, it’s not…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
The subject of online anonymity came up at a house party a few weeks back. One of the people there—a friend I’d known for years—said he couldn’t get over the fact that a privacy reporter like me would use their full name on any social site. I told him that hiding behind an online…
The Standards Council of Canada has approved an IT-related standard which would eliminate new data silos and copies when organizations adopt or build new applications, thus apparently preventing any data copies being made with new applications. However, last-time integration could bring in legacy data via copies. The CAN/CIOSC 100-9, Data governance – Part 9: Zero-Copy…
from the “anonymized”-doesn’t-mean-anonymous dept We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless. For example, corporations will routinely inform you that it’s no big deal that they’re over-collecting and selling access to your browsing or location data to any…
Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data from the have-you-ever-noticed-that-making-money-is-the-only-thing-we-actually-care-about dept We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number…
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…