The Nudgestock conference sponsored my trip to
the beautiful town of Folkestone, England—to be wrong about ad
reform.
What I did was point out the ad medium/brand mismatch. I did say that
personalized advertising is optimized
for the needs of deceptive sellers, and doesn’t carry the signal
that legitimate brands need. Right so far.
But here’s where I messed up. As an Internet Optimist, I
assumed that the highest-reputation brands would seek out advertising
media better suited to costly signaling.
But that’s not what was happening, if I had been paying attention to
other trends.
Brand decision-makers did take steps to deal with the problem that a
higher-reputation brand doesn’t benefit from an advertising system
optimized for lower-quality sellers—but did it the other way around, by
cutting quality and/or service and burning brand reputation.
You can’t do that kind of cultural
imprinting advertising in a personalized medium. So I figured that
FedEx would keep bugging their agency and the rest of the ad system to
give them an ad medium that could. Because sending something FedEx was
different from sending it some other way. Anyone else remember the
feeling of dropping a package off at FedEx on time and then just not
worrying about it? They would have needed an ad medium that gets that
across. (A good brand is like a miniature version of Pascal’s Wager: you
spend extra money in order to avoid catching hell for not
choosing it.)
But I was wrong. What happened instead is that now sending a package
FedEx is more like “when it maybe, kinda, has to be there whenevs.” The
brand changed to fit the available advertising, not the other way
around.
Anyway, where I went wrong is that instead of the clients making the
ad business clean up, scam culture spread out to normal businesses too.
It’s a rugpull economy out there.
We Must Kill
Windows For A Just Future by Chris Person. They will extract rent
from you and your employer at every plausible juncture and give you
garbage in exchange. You must accept in your heart that Windows is a
lost cause.
No
one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught
me that he was wrong. by danah boyd. And when it comes to
internet-enabled predation, the biggest risk is not teenagers using the
latest social media site. The biggest risk is single moms using online
dating apps. Pedophiles seek out these women to get access to their
children. It’s sick. But no one wants to hear that. They want to focus
on the digital tools young people use….Truth be told, I’d have no
problem if certain social media platforms would be banned for everyone.
I think that many of the products in this space have devolved into
garbage.
Discover-Tech was on Google’s list of Certified External Vendors. It
was also on IAB Europe’s Global Vendor List since July 2, 2020. That
means it was “registered and approved” by IAB Europe, an association
that says it takes “reasonable steps to vet and approve” applicants,
including “the identity of the party or parties controlling the
vendor.”
But, for most of the period in which Discover-Tech had IAB Europe’s
blessing, its company records showed links to the spyware industry on
its board and among its shareholders….
So can we blame Apple for not treating the industry’s vendor lists as
a guarantee of trust and safety? No.
We found that the domains adv45.volasim[.]com and adv50.volasim[.]com
provided versions of Discover-Tech Ltd.’s campaign management system
“Controlium” which we consider to be associated with Discover-Tech
Ltd.’s deployment of spyware via targeted ads.
But an IAB Europe update which removed Discover-Tech from its Global
Vendor List (GVL) on 8 October added Volasim to the list on the same
day.
In my previous
post about this I mentioned that Apple is pretty squarely in the
mainstream on these issues. The FBI, CERN, and now CSO are
recommending ad blocking.
The adtech scene seems to be remarkably complacent about the security
problem, but the IT industry in general is on a tear about security
stuff because of all the
AI bug reports, so the situation is going to have to get fixed
somehow. So what’s going to fix it? Lately people have been fired up
about the prospects of two high-impact server-side projects that would
squeeze out the existing mess of third-party scripts in the browser.
Prebid Server overhaul: The open-source project
where adtech firms go to interoperate has a hell of an idea: What if we
had an advertising system that was all, like, fair, with no special peek
at everyone’s cards for Google? Anthony Vargas explains, in Prebid’s
Proposed Auction Overhaul Would Do What The Court Wouldn’t: Separate AdX
From GAM. Lots more adtech nerd details there. But the big idea is
giving Google the exact same access to the real-time auction as everyone
else.
Instead of the browser connecting to a bunch of different third
parties for ads and tracking, the browser just connects to Trusted
Server, and Trusted Server does the first-party routing to other
services. That doesn’t seem like a win from the user side—at first it
looks like a proxy hop that makes ad and tracker blocking harder while
passing all the same info to all the same third parties. (Yes, eventually
Apple will figure out how to block that too.) But in practice,
Trusted Server has the potential to make a large, and ultimately
user-positive, impact.
That’s because a Trusted Server is “trusted” only as much as you
trust the publisher.
Google makes money by getting the most lucrative possible ad onto the
cheapest possible content. That’s why (if you ever turn your ad blocker
off, as I sometimes do for research purposes) you see stuff like Google
running a CVS Pharmacy ad on a copyright-infringing download of
Algorithms and Data Structures for Massive Datasets by
Dzejla Medjedovic, Emin Tahirovic, and Ines Dedovic.
Google-delivered CVS ad on an infringing
ebook site featuring the book “Algorithms and Data Structures for
Massive Datasets”
And, if I’m following the Trusted Server development correctly, an
untrusted publisher would have severe difficulties in running one. A
sketchy “publisher” (like the Google-supported pirate ebook site above)
would be able to generate their own realistic-looking traffic to replace
or supplement whatever they got organically, but nobody would believe
them.
In Economics 101 Land, Trusted Server would become a huge win for the
legit, actually trusted, publishers. On the supply and demand chart for
ad impressions, quantity supplied would go way down, as Google can no
longer dump a bunch of crap ad impressions into the real-time auction.
And meanwhile, the Prebid Server project would make the whole market
fairer and result in more of the value of each ad making it through to
the publisher. Two big slices of Google crime removed, more money for
legit players.
Google retaliation
So, cool story bro, thanks to two server projects the publishing and
advertising bourgeoisie are going to bring down the overlord, the online
economy is going to level up from Google-feudal to the next node on the
tree of civilization, all well?
Not quite. Google still has a lot of political juice and can use it
in mysterious ways. (Were they behind the mysterious “Alliance for Legal
Fairness,” based in a WeWork in Virginia, that tried to carve out a commercial
exception for California wiretapping law?) So it’s not going to be
all legit server this, legit server that, without some pushback. With
control of Google Chrome, they’re going to keep doing anticompetitive
shenanigans. When the same company controls the browser’s JS
implementation, their own ad JS, and the default
tool for reporting how much the ads slow things down, they’re going
to win some.
At least some legit publishers will have a source of funds to make
all these much-needed changes. Ricky Sutton explains, in Two
swords hang over Google. A judge holds one. Yours is $36 billion.
Web publishers have filed “numerous private lawsuits” over Google’s past
conduct. And the DOJ has already found that Google illegally monopolized
the adtech market—so each individual case is down to how much exactly a
particular publisher lost.
Any web publisher with decent business records and a decent lawyer is
going to get a nice settlement, or judgment if it gets that far, from
Google. But somehow they have to not waste it.
Banner blindness is near universal, search traffic has run dry and
publishers are struggling for oxygen.
A consensus has emerged in recent years that the above statements are
true, and that the open web as we know it is on an irreversible decline.
Sure, certain corners of the web might be saved from extinction, like
pandas preserved in zoos or display inventory nested within a curated
deal.
In fact, the open web’s demise has been so thoroughly accepted as
reality that during the remedy phase of the Google ad tech antitrust
trial last year, Google’s attorneys and US District Court Judge Leonie
Brinkema seriously questioned whether open web display ads would even
exist as a material source of supply in a few years’ time, and thus
whether it even made sense to pursue a years-long remedy strategy.
But, to go back to the news I started this post with, the open web
has it worse than that. The adtech business is so far outside the
mainstream security consensus that the ad blocker has gone from niche,
to mainstream, to basically required.
It would be too easy to take the Google settlement, migrate the
existing adtech stack, security risks and all, to the server side and
call it good for another couple of years. But except for those who have
retirement coming up quickly, that’s not very future-proof. Some of that
Google settlement money has to go to squeezing out some of the
ridiculous amount of crime that online advertising has built up—cutting
dishonest third parties out of the loop instead of just putting a server
in front of them.
Renting
the Frontier, Owning the Core IP: How We Cut AI Forecast Costs from $40M
to $11M By Andy Nolan. (Ever notice there are “AI” projects that
involve pointing an LLM at a project that people already know needs to
be done, and that they can measure whether or not it worked, and there
are also “AI” projects that are basically one person spiraling?
Assigning a project to the right square of the 3×3 grid covered here
might be a way to prevent some of the second.)
Scam
With Your Friends: A Guide for Parents by Alina BÎZGĂ. The lesson
is not that children should never be curious about how scams work. In
fact, understanding common tactics is a good way to avoid them. The
important distinction is this: recognizing manipulation is a safety
skill; using it against someone causes harm.
previously:CCPA and
CIPA on the same site. It is possible to comply with both “flavors”
of California privacy law—CCPA and CIPA—by setting up one flow for the
Global Privacy Control users, and another flow for people who prefer
cross-context personalized advertising. One question, though.
Would everybody who wants personalized ads be locked in to
Rewarded Interest?
Rewarded Interest doesn’t have lock-in, though. It is designed to
integrate with the existing OpenRTB web ads. And
there’s nothing preventing some competitor from offering their own user
ID system that plugs in to OpenRTB the same way.
One company is an obvious contender to offer an alternative ID—and
they’re already well-known as a fast follower on software.
Amazon has buy-side adtech, Amazon
Ads Agent, a ready-to-go integration for their version of CMAID,
whatever they call it.
Amazon has plenty of bonus offers to reward people for their
data, so they don’t have to pay out all rewards in cash.
Amazon already has a first-party relationship with most
households in the USA.
So the answer is no. People who choose personalization will end up
with more than one option. They’ll pick an ID to use based on which one
gives them the best deal. I don’t know if that will be Amazon or someone
else. This is a competition problem for Rewarded Interest, not a lock-in
problem for the people who choose personalized ads.
No
signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector by Torsten Slok.
VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but
mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is
unwilling to pay for it.
Elon
Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology by
Steve Blank. (The Eurostack needed content marketing, and Starlink
delivered. It looks like Elon Musk’s cracked-out communications style
did the Eurostack a big favor. It has been too easy for IT
decision-makers outside the USA to rationalize the decision to stick
with lock-in a little longer. But now it’s a lot harder to go through
the motions of business as usual. Blank says that this saga will “cost
the U.S. both leadership and jobs” but I doubt it. We still have some of
the best actual IT R&D teams here, and someone will figure out a
corporate and organizational structure that combines A-list engineers,
programmers, and managers in the USA with owning entities/key-holders in
more trustworthy jurisdictions.)
McKinley
Park News - Our Local News Is Leaving Facebook, Instagram and Meta
by Justin Kerr. In Meta’s upcoming terms on October 30, 2026 (as
below), if any enterprise has any type of presence on Facebook or
Instagram, then Meta and their cronies — and their AI bots — have a
right to scrape away that business’s content published outside of Meta
and sell or use it in competing business products. This scraping applies
even to third-party websites like the McKinley Park News that are
entirely separate from Meta and its services.
LLMs
are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger
scale by Keane Lucas, Aengus Lynch, Luna Tong, Luke Champine, Zygi
Straznickas, Dino Distefano, Harshikaa Agrawal Evyatar Ben Asher, Ava
Howell, Sami Jawhar, Chris Rohlf, Nickolai Zeldovich Nicholas Carlini,
Rajashree Agrawal, Jason Gross. Using Claude, we proved security
properties at the assembly code level (RISC-V) in over 100 real-world
open-source software libraries. To our knowledge, this represents the
first large-scale effort to use AI to apply formal verification to
production software at the assembly code level. While writing the
proofs, Claude also discovered bugs that had eluded detection for years,
despite trillions of test runs.
Devs
Shouldn’t Have To Protect Their Games, Valve Should Be Protecting Their
Shopfront By Luke Plunkett. If I want to play City Builder 2000,
for example, and log on to find 19 games all claiming to be some
variation of City Builder 2000, I am not going to sit there doing
detective work trying to find out which game is the one I actually want
to play. I am going to close Steam down and do something else with my
time, because that is not how you run a shopfront.
Why
Is Your Cost per Acquisition Going Up? by Rick Bruner. (Why do so
many marketers know that Meta and Google perpetrate fraud on their
users, on content creators, and on the tax collector…but still believe
that those companies are totally honest with us?)
Some jurisdictions have consent-based privacy
laws.
Some jurisdictions have opt-outs.
And then there’s California. We have both. For CIPA you need consent,
for CCPA you have to handle opt-outs, including Global Privacy Control
(GPC).
Sites are going through the five stages of
CIPA getting this stuff set up right. A few have it down, while
others, not so much.
Some of the site features that are set up to comply with one law are
creating problems under the other.
The right way
Here’s how to get compliance with both, with minimal risk and the
least possible hassle for the user. Developing this now (or
realistically not now now, it is Q4) will save a lot of boring
but high-stakes compliance meetings.
Check for a consent cookie (or a logged-on user who has already
consented). If consent is on, go to step 6.
Check GPC. If it’s on, go to step 7.
Show the consent dialog, along with CCPA and CalOPPA required
features such as link to privacy policy.
Is Rewarded Interest running? Rewarded Interest suppresses the
consent dialog and shares CMAID. Go to step 6.
User makes a choice. If the user declines consent, go to step
8.
Set or refresh the consent cookie. Load cross-context tracking
scripts. END.
Acknowledge the user’s GPC in the page footer.
Continue without cross-context tracking scripts. END.
Eight steps looks like a lot at first, but look, we only have two END
states, and the only people who have to see the consent dialog are
visitors with neither GPC nor Rewarded Interest.
One more step that has to happen when the user transitions from a
logged-off to a logged-on state, or if they arrive with a valid session
cookie that identifies them. Check for the consent cookie, and if it’s
not present, then flag the user’s record in the CRM system as “do not
sell or share”. That’s basically a CCPA thing. You can’t just do
opt-outs as a front-end task, they have to affect server-to-server
traffic, too. And if the user changes their profile to allow tracking,
set the consent cookie when they log in.
Update: For CIPA you need to get “consent to
wiretapping” that is acceptable to a California jury. The weak EU-style
“consent” to data processing that Irish regulators tolerate is not
really useful here. Don’t re-use GDPR design or copy for CIPA. (It is
often easier to reform a problematic data practice than to try to
explain it in a way that’s clear enough to get meaningful consent to
it.)
Somewhere around the whole consent rigmarole is going to be an
opportunity to promote Rewarded Interest to people who would likely want
it. That would give them a better experience in future. (Likely GPC
users are already getting that option promoted to them by the privacy
scene.)
And of course some pages have to work without third-party tracking at
all (such as the privacy policy and ToS pages. You can’t block the
privacy policy page with a consent dialog.)
So that’s the right way, what about some…interesting…CIPA/CCPA
mash-ups?
In California you have the right to hire
a CCPA lawyer and a CIPA lawyer who don’t speak to each other, I
guess
Wrong: break CCPA compliance trying to do CIPA
All of the wrong ways are basically do a bunch of extra compliance
tickets and create a bunch of extra risks. And they’re more complicated
than the steps above. TODO: learn Mermaid so I
can diagram how hairy some of these are.
The first wrong way is CIPA consent UX that blocks the CCPA and
CalOPPA required features. We don’t just have two privacy laws here, we
have two parallel systems but way more than two laws. Don’t forget the
Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 (CalOPPA).
You can’t block people from the CCPA/CalOPPA stuff just to get them
to do the CIPA stuff first. All the compliance tickets have to take into
account the work done on the other compliance tickets.
Wrong: relying on CIPA consent to do “wiretapping” but not “sale or
sharing”
Some lawyers claim a path through the legal weeds of the definitions
of “wiretapping” and “sale or sharing” that makes it technically
possible to load some third-party trackers with the right configuration
to do something slightly different for the users who have given consent
under CIPA but are still opted out under CCPA.
That’s just a recipe for explaining to CalPrivacy why the site isn’t
doing dark patterns.
Regular people, even in California, don’t think about this stuff to
enough understand why there is both and opt-out and a consent and they
could technically be different.
The only manageable way to make it work is to lump, not split. CCPA opt out == CIPA no consent.
Why
I Resist Generative “AI” by Esther Weidauer. (Good list of reasons.
Some of the best would apply even to a hypothetical future legit LLM.)
The psychological damages caused by LLM use, sometimes even in the
short time, are well documented by now, even by organisations operating
or investing in these systems.
HTML Can Do
That by Chris Burnell. (Covers dialog and other handy
elements, no JS needed. This site has a dialog element on it, if you try
with ad blocker off: next steps on
tinyMyTerms)
Another day of Internet security getting on the
front page. Yes, trillions of dollars worth of Internet companies are
depending on a PHP
Foundation with a budget of $730,534—free-ride much? but others have
made that point better.
The thing that bugs me about the security situation lately is,
normally, when there’s a security problem, the natural reaction for the
maintainers of the affected system is to ask: where else could something
similar be happening?
For example, Linux has been using Coccinelle,
which includes detection of problematic programming patterns in C
code, for decades now. And of course there’s a whole LLM bug finding
trend (which Greg Kroah-Hartman explains in Security in the LLM
Age). Learn to spot bugs, match patterns, find more bugs.
Discover-Tech has appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved”
vendors maintained by Google and advertising industry association IAB
Europe, and has served ads via major networks such as Google, Yandex,
and Beeswax.
Yes, a malware distribution operation got on the IAB Europe TCF
vendor list. So you might think that the organization responsible for
that list would be all, sacré bleu, how did that happen? We’d
better check if any other malware is on there!
Discover-Tech is currently suspended from the GVL following an audit
conducted by IAB Europe under its TCF Compliance Programmes, which
identified violations of the TCF Policies. The suspension will remain in
place until the identified violations have been fully remedied and
compliance with the applicable TCF requirements has been verified by IAB
Europe.
Further confirmation of the findings published today could also
justify a definitive expulsion from the GVL.
While we take reports of illegal practices seriously, we are not
equipped or mandated to independently investigate conduct falling
outside the substantive scope of the TCF, and will be monitoring any
relevant investigations and findings by competent authorities.
Vendors and other market players who have information about the
practices by other companies that may not comply with the TCF Policies
may also share their concerns via an online form here.
That doesn’t look like taking reports of illegal practices seriously.
That’s more like: security? idk lol
Zero effort to go back and check that TCF vendor list for, say, any
other vendors running obviously bogus ads for brands they
don’t have as clients?
IAB, WFA, ISBA, IPA and AOP – our predominant industry bodies -
represent almost every business that funds, sells or depends on open-web
advertising, and each has done serious work on developing standards and
guidance regarding privacy and consent. Even so, the open web still has
no shared position that a consumer or politician would recognise.
Nothing explains in straightforward terms why it deserves to exist and
how it behaves.
But the industry does have a shared position. And it’s we
are not equipped or mandated to keep OUR APPROVED VENDORS from
attacking you.
The view from outside the marketing filter bubble
Check out the coverage in CSO by Taryn Plumb: No
click required: How the ad industry became a pipeline for mercenary
spyware. This is a view of the situation from neither the privacy
nerd side nor the adtech side. CSO is a neutral mainstream
professional site for corporate security people. And here’s what they’re
recommending, along with some other security advice.
Push a vetted ad-blocking extension to managed browsers through
policy rather than leaving it to users to install it.
Disable advertising identifiers on corporate mobile devices through
mobile device management (MDM) and restrict ad-supported consumer apps
on devices holding sensitive data.
Apple is not using some mystical Reality Distortion Field to persuade
people to be all unfairly biased against adtech. James Hercher asks, Has
The Ad Industry Lost The Pulse Of American Consumers?, but it’s not
just consumers. It’s security professionals too. CSO is only
the latest mainstream organization to advise people about the risks of
surveillance advertising. The FBI
and CERN
have already issued ad blocking advice, too.
Yes, I know Apple is doing shenanigans in order to favor their own
ads. And yes, Google
and Meta ad risks are worse than open web, and Apple plays nice with
those companies anyway. In the long run, Apple can’t avoid
enshittification any more than any other publicly traded company can.
But Safari developers are solidly part of the general security
consensus, while the adtech business really isn’t. Responsible
organizations respond to a new security problem by using it as a pattern
to check for more like it.
The
disability inclusion effect by Thomas McKinlay. Include people
with disabilities in your ads, doing the same things a non-disabled
person would (not showing them as vulnerable, or defined by their
disability). People will have a more positive view of your ad, your
brand, and will be more likely to choose your product.
Budapest
Audio Expo 2026 by Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik. We were looking for where
the band is hiding, as it sounded like an actual band was there, not
just a pair of speakers. Best of all: this was one of the most
affordable systems at the expo, beating many more expensive systems in
listening experience.
‘Reverse-Engineer
Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI by Jason Koebler. (Vibe-coded
smart TV firmware isn’t going to be perfect, but it only has to be
better than the growth hacking firmware that comes with the TV.)
A family is gathered around a mousehole labeled “Programmatic web
ads” constructing an elaborate trap. Meanwhile, two human-sized
cockroaches labeled “Meta” and “Google” are sitting at the family’s
dining table eating their dinner. One cockroach says, “How’s your pest
control program coming along?”
He accurately puts some of the blame on Google and Meta for choosing
to interoperate with this “demand side platform.” If anyone had actually
looked at the ads they would have seen that something isn’t right. But
actual ad review depends on human moderators, who tend to level up at
labor organizing pretty quick, and Big Tech always puts union-busting
ahead of user security.
Push a vetted ad-blocking extension to managed browsers through
policy rather than leaving it to users to install it.
Block ad and tracking domains at the DNS or secure web gateway layer;
this reaches in-app ads on managed phones.
Disable advertising identifiers on corporate mobile devices through
mobile device management (MDM) and restrict ad-supported consumer apps
on devices holding sensitive data.
Yes, this is a publication for mainstream “corporate security
decision-makers.” Online ads are a subset of online security risks now.
(Maybe more security decision-makers and marketing decision-makers
should sit together at lunch at more companies, just saying.)
Anyway, the Discover-Tech story is bad, but, as a wise man once said, It’s even worse
than it appears. That was one relatively small company operating in
“open web” advertising, the kind of real-time auction that a research
organization like Citizen Lab can watch from the browser side.
Internally, though, Meta and Google have their own versions of
“Discover-Tech,” constantly refreshed by machine learning, still
running. Putting users at risk is just how those companies work.
Meta doesn’t just make 10% of ad revenue from scams. The scammers act
as shill bidders to drive up the ad rates for the legit advertisers.
And Google’s ad-based search ad system is most lucrative when more
bidders content for “hot” keywords like brand names—which means that
Google’s ad ML “learns” to match scammers, trademark infringers, and
malware distributors with victims.
By now, the people complaining about Meta and Google data practices
are not just the usual privacy nerds. The Big Tech crime wave is
mainstream now. The Kitboga Show is a popular YouTube channel that does
comedy bits like putting scammers on the phone with AI-generated victims
who keep running into computer difficulties. Some of the worst stuff
covered on there comes straight out of the Google search ads. Watch (487) Dumb
AI Security Flaw Ruins Scam Call Center - YouTube (skip to 14:09
if you’re impatient.) please check cleaning up YouTube
before clicking through to YouTube if you haven’t already. Or use your
own independent client.
Google’s trademark policy is designed to facilitate scams.
No restrictions on using some other company’s trademark unless
the trademark holder reports the individual ad or account. A
bank or SaaS company can’t just say, nobody’s allowed to use this
trademark in an ad but us and our authorized service providers. They
have to report each infringer one at a time. (And scammers can get new
ad accounts hella fast.)
And Google’s ML “learns” to match the infringing ad with likely
victims, not with the trademark holder. You can’t report an ad you don’t
see. The owner of a software trademark never sees the malware fake of
their product.
Google doesn’t just make trademark holders play Whac-A-Mole with
scammers. Google has built an impossible version of the game, where the
malware and scam “moles” pop up far away, where the “whacker” can’t see
or reach them.
So the connection between Big Tech and scams continues to become part
of the culture. If the FBI and a popular YouTube channel aren’t
mainstream enough for you, how about Chase Bank? Facebook and Instagram
scams are just as well-known now, and Chase warns,
Scammers create ads on social media offering merchandise at great
prices and set up bogus websites that all look exactly like genuine
retailers.
Discover-Tech was a real story, and a real risk. But all the worse
stuff continues. Meta and Google run a bunch of “Discover-Tech”s
internally, every day.
More later.
Bonus links
AI Questions
Put Massachusetts Sportsbooks Under Review on ReadWrite. The
Massachusetts Gaming Commission has asked all seven licensed mobile
sportsbook operators to explain how they use artificial intelligence and
machine learning, giving them until November 3 to respond….The
commission asks whether operators use AI, machine learning, algorithms,
automated decision-making or similar tools for marketing, promotions or
customer engagement. (About time. More on this issue: Do
you have a license for that robot bookie?)
Character.ai’s
Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work by Jason
Koebler. (Would have been nice, but character.ai was a risky Google
project spun out as a separate legal entity that “pays Google for cloud
services.” This is Google’s hazardous experiment containment system
working as designed.)
Notice how many “this site uses cookies” dialogs, asking you to
consent to web tracking, are showing up in California now?
When they weren’t showing up before?
What’s going on is that companies are adjusting to some news from
Sacramento. It turns out that we have had a privacy “private right
of action” (PRA) for a while now. Like, since 1967.
That’s an awkward fact on the ground for Big Tech and for the fraud
and disinfo that they enable, but good news in the medium term for legit
companies.
Not everybody is adapting to the situation at the same rate, though.
And the “cookie banners” aren’t the final result here. If you look
carefully, you can spot the stages.
1. Oh, no, lawyers! We better put a cookie banner on the site!
This is an understandable reaction because it’s based on what a lot
of companies already did for GDPR in the EU. This is only the first
stage, though, partly because CCPA+CIPA is fundamentally different
legally from ePrivacy+GDPR, but mostly because there’s no California
equivalent to Ireland’s Data
Protection Commission—which is supposed to be in charge of applying
EU privacy law to the Big Tech companies that run their EU operations in
Ireland, but doesn’t really do much.
In Europe, Big Tech and their enablers can get away with breaking the
law because the fix is in. California, not so much. On privacy, we have
three enforcers, not one: the Attorney General, CalPrivacy (our
dedicated privacy agency), and attorneys in private practice performing
public service. And unlike the way things work in Europe—where a
Big-Tech-friendly Irish bureaucrat can block privacy cases or at least
delay them for years—none of the California three can block the other
two.
2. Oops, better actually hook up the cookie banner so it does
something.
You might be surprised how many sites have a really nice “consent” UX
but then the third-party tracking runs
whether or not the user clicks it.
Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, because so much stuff seems
broken now. Development teams are understaffed, in the weeds, and trying
to vibe-code their way out of it.
What I think may be going on is that sites are doing both cookie
banners and services that block AI crawling. And when you run
an end-to-end test to make sure that no trackers are loading without
consent, the test script is being detected as a bot, so it’s getting the
HTTP response that bots get, not the regular page with tracking scripts
that users do.
Anyway the next step is to wait for consent to turn the tracking on,
and make sure it works.
It looks like oxide.computer is about at
stage 2
Basically set one first-party cookie to indicate cross-context
tracking mode, and only do the tracking if the user has already opted
in.
This is a little tricky because cross-context tracking mode is not
just a front-end ticket. It also needs to cover stuff like Custom
Audiences and Conversions APIs—which means that you need to check
whether cross-context tracking is in effect when a user submits a form,
and have a cross-context tracking flag in the CRM so you know not to use
that record for server-to-server tracking.
Technically, if you want to get into the legal weeds, the CCPA “opt
out of sale or sharing” is different from the CIPA “did not consent to
wiretapping.” So, technically, a company that really wanted to
over-invest in privacy lawyers could track CIPA “consent to wiretapping”
and CCPA “opt out of sale or sharing” separately, and support
22 code paths.
But that’s way too much nerd stuff, and way too confusing. The user research supports more
lumping and less splitting: just keep track of cross-context tracking on
or off.
If someone declines CIPA consent, assume that’s also the equivalent
of a CCPA “do not sell”. And if someone opts out under CCPA, assume
they’re also declining consent under CIPA. That’s not just simpler to
test and harder to break, it’s also less likely to result in getting
dinged for deceptive UX/Dark
Patterns. (Yes, adding functionality to try to lower CIPA risk could
be adding CCPA risk. The safer approach is to give site visitors the
benefit of the doubt and turn off CIPA “wiretapping” for everyone who is
entitled to have CCPA “sale” turned off, and the other way around.)
3. Hey, wait a minute, this is California, we have Global Privacy
Control
Since Global Privacy Control (GPC) is required
anyway, and it’s safer legally and QA-wise to maintain two codepaths,
not four, then check GPC up front and give those users the opted out and
CIPA safe version of the site.
Coincidence: I am sitting in a cafe right now and it looks like they
did this, and did it right. I got on the WiFi captive portal, which was
set up pretty slick, integrated with the company main site. A little
message about GPC popped up at the bottom of the page, and I checked
browser dev tools and things look squeaky-clean as far as both CIPA and
CCPA go. (TODO: test this with some other configurations and/or fresh
installs. I don’t want to make the claim that someone is already at
stage three until I make sure it works. If I can confirm the GPC/CIPA
setup is right I’ll link to what they’re using.)
3, continued. What about the customers who actually want
cross-context personalized ads?
Right now, people who really want ads that are individually
personalized don’t have a lot of great options.
Sitting back, leaving GPC off, and consenting to CIPA wiretapping is
a choice that allows the conventional Google and Meta tracking, so is
just going to result in more scams, price discrimination, and other
forms of adversarial personalization. And those pro-personalization
users are still stuck doing CIPA consent manually.
The conventional adtech/martech business gives those
pro-personalizaion users a terrible experience. And after all that, if
they’re on Apple Safari, some of the personalization they want is going
to break anyway because of Blocking
Identity Resolution Infrastructure.
There is one option for personalization under user control that does
give those personalization-seeking people what they want: Rewarded
Interest. A future CIPA-aware Rewarded Interest version could solve
CIPA consent—not exactly what the company does for users in the EU, but
close enough that CIPA support could be integrated with the Rewarded
Interest onboarding process in a pretty slick and legally safe way.
Pro-personalization users could install Rewarded Interest once instead
of navigating CIPA consent on every site that asks for it.
The most engaged, most valuable customers are often the same people
who’ve taken the most deliberate steps to make themselves less
measurable by conventional ad tech, which means that if you’re an
advertiser that is optimizing purely for trackability, you may be
underweighting your best customers.
There is already a Measurement
Gap between “upper funnel” and “lower funnel” advertising, and the
risk of over-emphasizing the most trackable customers just adds to that.
Rick Bruner of Central Control suggests more, and more statistically
valid, experiments: The
Benchmark Advertising Still Needs. It is possible to do
“transparent, unbiased, and replicable techniques for measuring
incremental advertising impact with experimental design” (see Geo RCT
Guide) but valid measurements can’t depend on taking Big Tech’s word
for everything.
5. Time to stop selling out customers to Big Tech
The terms on which Big Tech interacts with other companies keep
getting more and more one-sided—and rigged against both the users and
the legit advertisers. They’re at third stage enshittification
for anyone following along at homw
As Big Tech’s villainy level increases, can any “consent” dialog both
explain it well enough that people could give informed consent to it,
and also not scare them off? The fraction of users who will willingly
give Meta and Google the data needed to more effectively scam them
is…probably not super high.
And “AI” harm isn’t just about copying sites. Meta’s main use of “AI”
is to automatically match ads with people likely to click, which often
means matching scammers to victims. Meta
earns 10% of revenue from scams directly, but the real impact is
higher, because scammers act as shill bidders in Meta’s internal ad
auction—driving up ad rates for the legitimate advertisers too.
Google’s system is also increasingly scam-friendly, as the company
has adopted more and more
one-sided terms over the years. The Google
Ads Trademark Policy means that Google no longer enforces trademarks
in ads, unless specifically reported. The catch is that Google’s ad
system is designed to target the ads to people likely to click, which
means it “learns” to hide them from the real trademark holder.
The result is that Google has become a delivery service for malware.
The FBI
recommends, Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet
searches.
Both companies have chosen to take a stand that’s explicitly hostile
to legitimate advertisers on their platforms, and enable user harms at a
scale that would have been unimaginable in other advertising media. It’s
not about “business vs. consumers.” Legitimate businesses and their
customers are on the same side.
If we survive these times and their history is written, one of the
hardest parts to explain will be Big Tech, and how such transparently
criminal organizations grew to such great power and influence.
A future stage 6: We should improve society somewhat.
Getting an individual advertiser out of Big Tech’s racket is a
positive move. But to be fair, we’re still going to need to do something
about these companies in general.
A conventional FTC breakup is too slow and uncertain. AT&T
re-combined, and Microsoft and Google dodged theirs.
The
Supreme Court Is Leaning Toward a Digital Privacy Victory by Matt
Ford. The Supreme Court appeared likely to side with a customer who
invoked a semi-obscure federal law to sue Paramount for sharing his
personal information with Facebook, during oral arguments on Wednesday,
though multiple justices signaled that they might constrain such
lawsuits in future cases.
Canada
could save millions by developing its own operating system instead of
relying on Microsoft Windows by Joshua M. Pearce. The U.S. later
passed the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, which permits
American authorities to compel U.S.-based providers like Microsoft,
Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta to disclose data within their control, even
when it’s stored abroad. This means that even storing data with American
companies in Canada does not place it beyond the reach of the U.S.
government.
Yes, it’s a Facebook ad mimicking Facebook’s own notification
widgets.
A company that’s so good at AI that they can recognize billions of
people in random uploaded photos, but can’t see when an ad is designed
to look just like their own images?
That’s like a high-school-level machine learning project to spot. And
these ads have been running for quite a while now. Along with a bunch of
other crooked stuff, like trademark-infringing ads that take advantage
of a system designed to
help fakes hide from the real brand.
That puts companies using Meta Pixel, SDKs, and CAPI in an awkward
position. The data being collected is feeding in to Meta AI systems that
are designed to defraud people—and a dollar that someone loses to a
Facebook scam is a dollar they can’t spend on a legit product or
service.
Bonus links
Annual Report
2025 out now! from noyb. noyb has filed its second
complaint against OpenAI and has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta
over AI training. While many details are still unclear, we see
collective redress as the primary new approach to enforcement and intend
to expand in this area.
Russia
was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine by
Jeremy Hsu. Russian companies like Yandex will also have a hard time
establishing infrastructure backup systems outside of Russia to provide
additional wartime resiliency. That is partly because of the
Sovereign Internet Law passed by the Russian parliament and
signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in 2019….By comparison,
Ukraine has a much more decentralized digital ecosystem consisting of
smaller data centers. It has also taken steps to build out backup
infrastructure, including moving some equipment and networks underground
or outside the country.
Bless
The BC250, The Budget E-waste Steam Machine by Chris Person.
Since it is no longer profitable to run these things in servers to
mine bitcoin, many of them appeared on the secondary market as
e-waste….Despite having fairly lean performance by gaming standards, the
board includes something worth its weight in gold: 16 gigs of GDDR6 RAM
soldered right in there that cannot be salvaged and scalped.
In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative
importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you’ve made
something better, but does anyone know about it? Won’t people just
continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think,
act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would
markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours
researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product
better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for
companies. This is good!
Better shopping bots (agents) tend to lower the returns to
adversarial personalization, because a good bot/agent can take on a
variety of customer qualities to try to get the best possible deal.
Adversarial personalization: who it works for, who it doesn’t
Adversarial personalization works great for Big Tech companies, which
provide services to both big-budget and small-budget users and to both
honest and dishonest sellers. The biggest example of adversarial
personalization is the Big Tech senior fraud situation. Many older
people are spending less money on discretionary purchases but are
sitting on retirement savings, so Big Tech ML systems automatically
“learn” to match them not with legit products and services, but with
fraud operators.
Adversarial personalization is not just a Big Tech thing, though.
It’s also being offered to normal companies, in the form of
offering lower-quality products and services to customers with
fewer options
price discrimination
For normal companies, though, adversarial personalization is not such
a good deal. Hardly any firms try to serve as wide a customer budget
range as Big Tech, most firms offer products within a narrow quality
range, and almost no firm accepts the level of crime by its
counterparties that Big Tech does.
Collison makes the good point that
If true, a corollary is that information about product quality will
become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very
limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will
have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It’s often said that data is
becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models.
That’s obviously true, but I think there’s a secondary way in which it’s
more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)
The ROI on “the more you tell, the more you sell” goes up—and it also
goes up relative to the ROI of adversarial personalization.
In a pre-agent shopping environment, a company has to balance
investment in adversarial personalization against investment in possible
core competencies. Those might include
offer good service
make better stuff
keep prices down
With no shopping agents in the picture, ROI of adversarial
personalization is fairly predictable, because consumer
information-gathering time is limited.
Add agents, though, and the alllocation decision becomes tougher. The
company has to not just predict that the adversarial personalization
will work, and the profit from doing it won’t be captured by
the vendors and employees who do it, but that the company’s own “AI”
will beat whatever de-personalizing, bargain-hunting “AI” the customer
can use.
With more uncertain returns to adversarial personalization, the
quality, service, and price options look a lot more attractive. A
company can’t git gud at everything, and is more likely to be
able to hire the right people to pursue an industry-specific quality,
service, or price advantage than to be able to outbid everyone else in
every industry for adversarial personalization services and experts.
Impact on marketing projects
For quite a while, one of the most underrated but impactful marketing
projects has been the photo gallery site. Hire a photographer who’s
willing to license under Creative Commons, stage a bunch of photos
related to the products or services, and put them up with informative
captions and all the right Creative Commons incantations to make it
clear that they’re available to Wikipedia, and for use on news sites,
with credit.
Another useful project, sometimes pigeonholed under SEO, is the
knowledge base. Go through the customer support tickets, find the ones
with generally useful info, strip out any customer-specific material,
and put them up on the web.
Open source software that enables use of a product (such as device
drivers, or clients for an API) is another good example, and already a
checklist item for some markets.
All three of those can be lumped under “enable a high-information
customer to make a good decision” and will have more and more impact in
the increasingly common case where (1) more customers are acting like
high-information customers because of agent help and (2) the company is
focusing on service, quality, or price instead of adversarial
personalization, so is more likely to make a sale when the customer
makes a good decision.
