How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest

‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’—Paul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)   Signal   You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what can’t you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their […]

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Facebook takes away user control over their own advertising preferences

Facebook’s advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.    Over the years I’ve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if they’re uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you […]

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If FCA kills Chrysler today, then it’s another chapter of a company weakening its brands

There’s a rumour circulating that Fiat (specifically, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, or FCA) will kill the Chrysler marque today.    The range currently consists of two models: the ageing 300 and the relatively fresh Pacifica.    It seems to be another step in the mismanagement of car marques, especially US ones, something I wrote about many […]

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Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’

Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebook’s practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out?    Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that […]

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The fall of Facebook advertising and the rise of something else

I remember when Michael Wolff was very bullish about the internet in the 1990s, so when he starts sounding warning bells, we had better take heed.    The way Michael paints Facebook—and a belief that its advertising model will eventually collapse for being so limited—is not unfamiliar to anyone who ever wondered, during the dot-com […]

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