Is Google stealing your voice for its virtual assistant? Meanwhile, Mktg Stinx

Here’s Google’s latest privacy gaffe, the latest in a long, long line where they pretend to not know it’s happening till they’re embarrassed into admitting that it is happening—and then the authorities will fine Google millions of dollars which they will make back in a few hours. Ibly writes in a post on the fediverse […]

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Pirate sites, content mills and splogs exist because of Google

In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it weren’t for Google, there’d be no incentive to do content mills or splogs. I replied: ‘People really are that stupid, and itʼs all thanks to Google. Google doesn’t care about ad fraud, and anyone can […]

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Musings for today: back on Facebook, untracked ads, Autocade rankings

It’d be unfair if I didn’t note that I managed to see a ‘Create post’ button today on Lucire’s Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today. Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which […]

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The erosion of standards

For homeowners and buyers, there’s a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealand’s Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.    My intent isn’t to repeat someone’s copyrighted […]

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The pathetic snowflakes of Big Tech

We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the […]

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On OneDrive, Flickr, and FLOC

Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I don’t know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day. Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the […]

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With Facebook, the dots are really easy to join, so why haven’t more done so?

Bob Hoffman always has great stuff from the advertising world, especially on Facebook. My criticisms have come from the user’s perspective and the very obvious BS Facebook peddles, while Bob reads the US press and combines it with a professional’s knowledge.    In his latest newsletter, it’s a familiar tale: Facebook realized misinformation had greater […]

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Online advertising dollars: Google’s cut from your work is 40 per cent

From Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter of May 24: ‘two weeks ago a study by the ISBA and PcW that reported that half of every “programmatic” ad dollar is scraped by adtech middlemen’ and ‘According to a paper written by Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale University, Google pockets about 40¢ of every […]

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Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.    Last month, Bob Hoffman’s excellent The Ad Contrarian newsletter noted, ‘I believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, […]

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Facebook is getting away with it again—even though it knew about Cambridge Analytica

Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.    Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on […]

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