Attention Economy: Media & Digital Advertising
Notes
from: protocol — "Concern trolls and power grabs" (07-13-21)
- Where Facebook's developers can only offer cautious edits to Apple and Google's privacy proposals, knowing full well that every exchange within the W3C is part of the public record, Rosewell is decidedly less constrained.
- https://github.com/privacycg/proposals/issues/10#issuecomment-708311334
- Snyder and others argue these new arrivals, who drape themselves in the flag of competition, are really just concern trolls, capitalizing on fears about Big Tech's power to cement the position of existing privacy-invasive technologies.
- "It looked like the real conversation was the one happening at the W3C, and by real, I mean the one where Google was actually listening."
- Lysak continued on with another jab at Apple's motives: "If a proposal kills tracking for some businesses and not others, that is in scope as it violates W3 rules for anti competition, especially if the proposer's company directly benefits."
- Indeed, 40 of the 369 members in the Improving Web Advertising business group work for Google.
- Rosewell's "tenacity" has certainly been convenient for Facebook, a company that relies on third-party tracking to sell ads but is in no position to publicly challenge any other company's privacy proposals after its own seemingly endless parade of privacy scandals.
from: Stratechery — Philosophy and Power; Advertising, Targeting, and Tracking; The Real Winners (07-14-21)
- When I say I am with Rosewell, I mean that he is right that the fundamental issues around these debates really are a question of philosophy; technical questions are implementation details.
- There are, for example, three distinct questions about ads themselves:
- Is advertising good or bad?
- Are targeted ads good or bad?
- Is tracking good or bad?
- To put it another way, this question is about the shift from content-based targeting to behavior-based targeting.
- What is perhaps a surprise to many, though, is that tracking isn’t going anywhere either: the question at play is who gets to do it.
- The company is leading a push to shift the entire advertising stack to your device — not unlike FLoC! — which would make Apple (and Google) the only intermediaries for effective targeted advertising.
To catch a priest (Aug 2. 2021)
Here’s a (possibly) mind-blowing fact: just about every time you load a web page on a browser, or click to a new experience inside an app, there’s code being run that sends your data to an ad exchange, which then broadcasts that data to hundreds of potential bidders (themselves connected to countless actual advertisers). For every click of yours, picture a dense bundle of data going into the cloud and instantly duplicating into hundreds of copies to thousands of servers, each one accessing millions of rows of data to figure out who you are. That’s the pulsing, arterial information flow of the modern mobile internet, and it beats billions of times a day.
References
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