Read Aggrieved ad tech types decry Google dominance in W3C standards – who writes the rules and for whom? by Thomas Claburn (The Register)
World Wide Web Consortium urged to get its governance act together
Earlier this week, 20 web advertising companies wrote to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s Advisory Board to ask that the standards organization revise its governance process to prevent ad tech giants like Google from running roughshod over the concerns of others with an interest in the web.
Read How to Change Your Off-Facebook Activity Settings by Gennie Gebhart (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Facebook's long-awaited Off-Facebook Activity tool started rolling out today. While it's not a perfect measure, and we still need stronger data privacy laws, this tool is a good step toward greater transparency and user control regarding third-party tracking. We hope other companies...
Bookmarked January 29, 2020 at 06:45AM
Read Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data by Joseph Cox (Vice)
An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.' Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.
Bookmarked on January 29, 2020 at 06:41AM
Read Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads (The Verge)
New ad technology for Spotify-exclusive podcasts is coming
This is exactly the sort of silo-ization of our data and attention we’ve come to expect from big tech. My friend Kim Hansen, in particular, saw this coming several years ago and was very worried about it.

Dawn Ostroff, Spotify chief content officer

Former President of the UPN and the CW and under Les Moonves at Viacom/CBS.
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 12:35PM

👓 The Google News Initiative: Building a stronger future for news | Google

This article is even more interesting in light of the other Google blog post I read earlier today entitled Introducing Subscribe with Google. Was today’s roll out pre-planned or is Google taking an earlier advantage of Facebook’s poor position this week after the “non-data breach” stories that have been running this past week?

There’s a lot of puffery rhetoric here to make Google look more like an arriving hero, but I’d recommend taking with more than a few grains of salt.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online.

we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals.

I’m curious what their internal projections are for ROI?


People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.

Heavy hit in light of the Facebook data scandal this week on top of accusations about fake news spreading.


That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.

Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die.
Reference: How Facebook is Killing Comedy


we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.

Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?


We worked with the industry to launch the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project to improve the mobile web

There was some collaborative outreach, but AMP is really a Google-driven spec without significant outside input.

See also: http://ampletter.org/


We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.

Interestingly the technology here isn’t that different than the Facebook Data that Cambridge Analytica was using, the difference is that they’re not using it to directly impact politics, but to drive sales. Does this mean they’re more “ethical”?


With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web.

Is this sentence’s structure explicitly saying that AMP is not “open web”?!