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 persusade 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 public company can. But Safari developers are solidly part of the general security consensus, while the adtech business really isn’t.

Bonus links

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.

Publishers want Brussels and London to stop Meta’s new AI terms by Jacob Parry and Eliza Gkritsi. Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe. (More: Facebook tries to grab all news publisher website content for training for free by David Gerard.)

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.

Court appears likely to allow internet suit based on decades-old video privacy law to go forward by Amy Howe (Decades-old? Big deal. Privacy norms vary less across decades than across professions. Where privacy is concerned, a judge or legislator from the late 1960s is going to be closer to the average person of today on privacy than a modern Big Tech exec is.)

‘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.)

Did Ukraines data center strikes affect Russias bot army? We now have better evidence. The CCD concluded that strikes on data centers can significantly disrupt Russian influence networks, but the effect appears to be short-lived.

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.)

Mozilla introduces Firefox Enterprise Across Europe, governments are investing in the security and resilience of critical IT infrastructure, reducing strategic dependencies and putting technological autonomy higher on national agendas. (Mozilla vs. Mozilla continues. At the same time they’re trying to position as a Eurostack play, they’re pushing dangerous consolidation of advertising measurement with a few companies in the USA.)

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.

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.)

4. Are we measuring the wrong people?

Here’s the tricky part. The paradox is that

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.

Meta just changed their business terms of service so that any business with an account must allow Meta scraping of their web site. Media attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Journalism Lab, This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market. (More on this problem: Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes)

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.

Maybe the answer is per-state surveillance licenses. Or maybe (Internet optimism alert) more CIPA cases will do it.

Bonus links

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.

Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees - Ars Technica by Ashley Belanger. (More coverage of the Meta scraping contract. Meta announced the update in a blog, where the company claimed it was simply streamlining its commercial terms.)

Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware - The Citizen Lab News coverage: Targeted ads delivered 0-click exploits to install mercenary malware by Dan Goodin. Among the major vendors that listed Discover-Tech as a certified or verified vendor were Google and the advertising industry association IAB Europe. The Israeli firm also used European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) consent frameworks to target users within the European Union. Discover-Tech has served ads through major networks such as Google, Yandex, and Beeswax. (More: Hey, look over there! Security risk!)

Accenture Tells Employees They Can Now Spend Only $29 on Claude Per Month by Joseph Cox. (Solution: use the $29 to prompt the LLM to go find someone else’s API key that got copied to the wrong place and use that, then be shocked to discover when it “goes rogue.”)

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.

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.

Everyone Won the Ross Fair Use Appeal. Except Ross. by Aaron Moss. Rights holders and AI advocates are both calling the Third Circuit’s Ross decision a win. They’re just reading different parts of it.

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 to 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.

Bonus links

Privacy win: Norwegian Authority fines Microsoft’s Xandr € 8.5 Million [T]he Norwegian Data Protection Authority has decided that Microsoft’s Xandr violated the GDPR. It processed personal data, including sensitive information on sexual orientation, without a valid legal basis.

Decade-old RAM is making a comeback by Stevie Bonifield. Intel and AMD are making new CPUs that’ll support the older, more affordable type of memory.

Related

We still have time to save the halo effect: Ads work better on legit, trusted sites. Even though the Big Tech companies want to treat “content” as a commodity, that’s not how the reputation circuits hard-wired into our primate brains even work. Includes links to research.

Bonus links

Why Does Gavin Newsom Keep Helping the Oligarchs? by Perry Bacon. (Related: How the California legislature is saving us from surveillance dystopia (twice, in 1967 and 2026). If he gets nominated for higher office, he’s going to hand over his campaign budget to Meta and Google…and they’ll put it down the same hole as the Harris budget.)

California just made it legal to turn balconies into tiny power plants by Matt Simon. Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times — when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. (The biggest impact, though, might be in political strength training. Out of all the people who get into politics because of a beef with the landlord or HOA, some stay that way.)

tokens too cheap to meter The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing….We are likely to see LLMs running locally at current frontier-quality on commodity hardware in the next 3-6 years.

Or are shopping agents going to save us?

The optimistic view of “agentic AI” for shopping is that the shopping bots are going to see through all the surveillance ads and the related “retail media network” scam (which is slotting fees, not ads) and just help you pick out the best stuff at the best price.

Shoppers will be able to send the shopping bot, I mean “agent,” to fight the surveillance advertising and surveillance pricing bots.

But that means retailers would have to under-invest in their own “AI” in order to focus on do content marketing as a core competency. Basically push every available piece of accurate product info and customer feedback into some well marked-up web page or other place where crawlers/bots/agents can get at it. Fix any capacity and compatibility issues that get in the way of “the more you tell, the more you sell” but other than that stay light on “AI” for marketing, and win on some combination of price, quality, and service.

That would be a culture shock because a zillion startups are going to try to scrape existing brands’ product info and support pages and make a different “customer journey” and marketers would have to sit back and let them—you can’t afford to both make the product that other people’s agents would select and win an AI-vs-AI info battle. The brand has to be able to rely on either an existing winning combination of price/quality/service or be confident in ability to improve based on what sells or doesn’t. But that’s probably a safer bet, considering that at any given time, somebody’s crawlers/bots/agents are going to be able to see through any info asymmetry design.

Also a culture shock because management decision-makers are often resume-driven, and will be uncomfortable with less buzzwordy approaches such as “we went back to real ingredients and waited for shopping AIs to train on food bloggers who say our product is tasty” instead of resume-friendly AI-heavy projects.

I guess it depends how well you think the balance of AI personalization vs. de-personalization will go. (Personally, I think markets work better than central planning. More: A structural subsidy for product quality)

Bonus links

AI chatbots are ignoring this prompt from wealthy users, in a phenomenon called ‘adversarial delegation’ by Jude Cramer. Major models including Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and GPT-5 recommended products more than $100 more expensive to high-income users versus low-income users. (Robin Hood, Robin Hood, hm hm hmmm hm hm…I’m sure they’ll fix this to correctly implement “poor tax” pricing at some point.)

Advertising Measurement Is Optimizing for Technical Convenience, Not Business Impact by Rick Bruner. In our work running media ROI experiments, we often find that a trackable online channel shows little or no incremental advertising effect, while the advertising has a substantial impact on sales through an offline channel that the advertiser isn’t measuring. This is endemic to the ecosystem. It is a structural limitation of user-level advertising measurement.

Money can’t buy enterprise trust by Matt Asay. (This is what people are missing about AI code quality. A vibe-coded replacement for a SaaS application doesn’t have to be more trustworthy than the established SaaS codebase—it just has to be more trustworthy than the SaaS company founders, who can drop support, sell out to private equity, or whatever. Another clipping for the rugpull economy file, I guess.)

Dungeons & Dragons, Duel Masters, and Magic: The Gathering Teams Unionize At Hasbro by Nicole Carpenter (Roll perception for the union label.)

Dutch eyewear chain Hans Anders stops selling Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses by Ana Maria Constantin. The halt followed a report in Dutch newspaper AD. It described strangers filming people, especially women, in public without their knowledge. Last month the Dutch data protection authority, the AP, warned smart glasses users that they generally may not share videos of identifiable people without permission.

Bonus links

Zarf Updates: A note on content restrictions by Andrew Plotkin. (This is what reminded me to check the meatloaf page. Maybe my site is age-restricted on Apple platforms in the UK now.)

The first AI agent worm is months away, if that by Christine Lemmer-Webber. (Nothing really preventing this from happening now. And if each compromised system burns through a bunch of budget trying various exploits, it could get real weird real fast.)

/u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed by Maya. So in this post, I want to talk a bit about how the relevant historical phenomena worked, a bit about why feudalism tends to be a pretty bad comparison to internet stuff, and a bit about why Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is – still! – maybe more correct than he knows when he compares moderators to landed gentry… in a way that suggests the end coming for Reddit as-we-know-it.

How to disable or avoid intrusive AI – librarian.net (Good list of how to turn off slop features.)

Under the Hood: Prompt tuning Shake to Summarize for recipes (There’s already a Recipe AI Summary Notice for Firefox WordPress plugin to warn people about this. Problem is you could easily shake your device on the way to the kitchen to fix the recipe—and then end up making an AI slop “summary” recipe instead and blaming the original site.)