Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
TikTok collected data about its users’ views on sensitive topics and censored content at the direction of its China-based parent company, the Justice Department said Friday, making its most forceful case to date that the video-sharing app poses a national-security threat. The sensitive topics TikTok tracked included the views of its U.S.-based users on gun control,…
If you still hold any notion that Google Chrome’s “Incognito mode” is a good way to protect your privacy online, now’s a good time to stop. Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San…
Former hedge-fund manager Jeff Bezos bet on a hunch two years ago and ended up with online bookstore Amazon.com, the poster-child of savvy Net commerce, even though it hasn’t earned a cent of profit yet. After a semi-successful IPO and in the midst of a legal scuffle with Barnes & Noble, Bezos says he isn’t…
Jeff Bezos loves being on the move. He sits in the back of a white van, beaming as usual, surrounded by an entourage of lanky young lieutenants from Amazon.com the Web’s biggest retail store and, someday, if Bezos gets it right, Earth’s Biggest Store. The early-morning landscape of southeast Kansas hustles by: wood-frame houses, trailers,…
Former UM privacy chief Arielle Garcia knows the $700bn global digital ad industry is founded on trading “useless, garbage data” because a) she spent a decade in media ops and compliance and b) she’s accessed her own profile from adtech vendors. The result? 500 laughably contradictory audience segments where she is simultaneously woman and man,…
Many people dream of becoming social-media stars like YouTube’s MrBeast or TikTok’s Charli D’Amelio. But for most who pursue careers as content creators, just making ends meet is a lofty goal. Clint Brantley has been a full-time creator for three years, posting videos on TikTok, YouTube and Twitch where he comments on news and trends related to…
“Uncovering Earth’s Secrets: A Journey Into Its Deepest Hole” That’s the title of a made-for-arbitrage (MFA) article about a failed Soviet-era scientific expedition to drill a hole tens of thousands of feet into the Earth’s crust. But it could easily double as a headline for the latest ad tech exposé. The story referenced above appears…
Sales are way up and ROAS is through the roof across search, social and ecommerce. At least, that’s what the ad platforms claim. But dig into the CRM, a brand’s primary source of actual sales data, and site traffic and engagement coming from search and social aren’t jumping. This is a relatively normal occurrence for…
Compliance is not a choice. But companies have some choice in how they tackle it. There are two main approaches. Businesses can implement a compliance program on a state-by-state basis, essentially devising different data strategies to meet the legal requirements in each state where they have customers. Or they can take a national approach by…
In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that had opened in 1923, four years before the advent of sound in film. Smith was…