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 […]
Read More… from Facebook takes away user control over their own advertising preferences
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffs—a group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social network—settled. Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth […]
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 […]
Read More… from Facebook is getting away with it again—even though it knew about Cambridge Analytica
Now for something actually important beyond my first world problems. Journalist Suzie Dawson has a fantastic piece outlining how the smear of ‘serial rapist’ is part of the playbook used against senior members of Wikileaks. Her article is well worth reading, especially in light of how the mainstream media have spun the narrative against […]
How quickly an opinion can change. I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008. For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that […]
Read More… from Tumblr is now where Verizon’s corporate agenda rule
As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default position—though when it becomes apparent that people simply aren’t civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions. We have Facebook making statements saying they are ‘Standing Against […]
Nest/Creative Commons We’ve been here countless times before since last decade. Funny how many of these “errors” Google has, and funny how they only admit to these “errors” after they get busted. How many more “errors” are there? If you have a Nest Secure, please be advised that there's a microphone in the system whose […]
Maurizio Pesce/Creative Commons At the F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook will offer a ‘clear history’ option. Considering that opting out of Facebook ad tracking does nothing, individually deleting the ad preferences that Facebook claims it would not collect only sees them repopulated, and hiding categories of ads does nothing, why would I […]
Read More… from Facebook’s ‘clear history’ option: why should I begin believing them now?
If you were one of the people caught up with ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative? Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by […]
Read More… from UK picks on independent Tweeters, falsely calls them Russian bots and trolls
Either Mark Zuckerberg is woefully ignorant of what happens at his company or he lied during his testimony to US lawmakers last week. As reported by Chris Griffith in the Murdoch Press, Zuckerberg said, ‘Anyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.’ […]