Tag: Advertising

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iOS 8 strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking

iOS 8 strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking:

It wasn’t touted on-stage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havok for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.

Good: Apple is demonstrably improving an aspect of wifi privacy. Kudos to them!

However: Retailers are using Bluetooth to engage in the same activity, so ideally a similar privacy enhancing technique will be designed when Bluetooth functionality is turned on.

Depressing Reality: I’ll really believe that Apple is invested in privacy when they enable/initiate similar privacy by design functions in their own physical environment system, iBeacons.

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How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web

Back in December, documents revealed the NSA had been using Google’s ad-tracking cookies to follow browsers across the web, effectively coopting ad networks into surveillance networks. A new paper from computer scientists at Princeton breaks down exactly how easy it is, even without the resources and access of the NSA.

Source: How advertising cookies let observers follow you across the web

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Good Branding

I’m not certain that equating GE’s equipment/software with humanity-enslaving code-based villains constitutes a good ‘branding image’

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2013.4.5

But perhaps the most important recent development at Facebook is one that has no immediate bearing on the company’s finances. In October, Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of monetization analytics—a convoluted, five-dollar title that obscures his importance at the company—took to the stage at a marketers’ conference to announce that Facebook had formed a partnership with Datalogix, a market-analytics firm with purchasing information on about 70 million American homes. Under the agreement between the companies, Facebook would be able to measure whether a user’s exposure to an ad on the site was correlated with that person’s making a purchase at a store.

That type of information is essential for Facebook. Put simply, many corporations are still mired in click-through data, a standard of analysis that fails to fully reflect purchasing activity generated by online advertising. “The click is a terrible predictor of off-line sales,” Smallwood says. “Every research company knows that’s true.”

Still, Smallwood acknowledges, Wall Street continues to view clicks as the critical measure of online-ad performance. “At some level, people have gotten used to the click, and they still want to see the click when they deal with online,” he says. “It’s kind of our job to explain that that is not necessarily the best measure.”

The numbers from the early studies are powerful. Some 70 percent of the campaigns that were measured showed sales equal to three times or more the amount spent for the ads; 49 percent brought in at least five times what the ad had cost.

Kurt Eichenwald, “Facebook Leans In”
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Quotations

2013.4.5

The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.

(…)

And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.

Om Malik, “Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy”
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Big data: the new oil?

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Should Microsoft Be Targeted for a Truth in Adverting Campaign?

So, the Microsoft 64GB Surface Pro will only have 23GB of usable storage at launch. This is, to be blunt, absurd. Consumers are entirely used to variations between the storage that manufacturers say will be available versus what actually is available for use, but in this case we’re talking about less than 50% of the advertised storage actually being available. Microsoft is saying that removing the recovery partition will alleviate some of this storage use, but that’s immaterial: few consumers will do this, or feel comfortable doing so. As a result, they’re going to generally have devices that have less than half of the market storage.

While Apple – and, to an extent, Google – comes under fire for announcing hardware specs and then not meeting them because of OS storage consumption, neither company has ever had such deceptive claims as Microsoft’s regarding the Surface Pro. I can entirely appreciate that the newest Microsoft OS plus applications consumes a huge amount of space. I’m OK with that. But, given this consumption, the 64GB surface shouldn’t ever be marketed (or even suggested as being) as a 64GB device; the device should be presented as being closer to the actual storage available. Don’t get me wrong, all OSes take room. But, as far as I know, no OS plus application suite has ever consumed this amount of space in competing product offerings.

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Quotations

Every time we come up with a technical solution that protects privacy, the websites come up with something they want to do that is broken by this privacy protection, and so they find a workaround for it and they basically break the privacy protection.

Lorrie Faith Cranor, from an interview with Ars Technica
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Google’s new privacy policy is going to be sheer gold for 1984 enthusiasts. While I’m not a fan of such simplistic references, it will provide a new round of comics for speakers at privacy, security, and surveillance conferences to rip off. Hopefully those same speakers aren’t themselves too tied to the notions of 1984 or the panopticon being the defining means of framing Google’s behaviours.

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Videos

OK GO and Advertise to Me

I had no idea that OK GO’s recent video was largely a sponsored ad for the car they’re driving.

I also don’t care, because:

  1. I had no idea what the car was until I read an analysis of the video;
  2. It’s just (to my mind) another ridiculously awesome music video from this band.

I’m willing to sit through the ‘ad’ on the basis that the ‘brand’ of the car is non-obtrusive: it’s just a particular vehicle (pardon the pun) to deliver a really cool cultural experience.