Some jurisdictions have consent-based privacy
laws.
Some juristictions 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 hassle
for the user. Developing this now will save a lot of boring but
high-stakes compliance meetings.
Check for a consent cookie. If it’s 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.
Seven 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
first-time 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-in state. 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.
Somewhere around the whole consent rigamarole is going to be an
opportunity to promote Rewarded Interest to likely prospects. 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.)
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 seven 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 stuff has to work
together.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Vibe
coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work
well by Lewis Parker. And the worst part is, at least where the
video game publishers will be concerned, some of these run
perfectly….It’s also extremely worrying that one of the four different
web browser ports of Halo: CE I played had working online servers…and my
ping was low.
AI-enabled
fraud cost Americans $148 billion in 2025 by JB Branch and Richard
Fiesta. The Consumer Federation of America estimates that Americans
lost $148 billion to online scams and crimes in 2025. That’s more than
$1,100 for every U.S. household and nearly a 26 percent increase from
the year prior. (One of the biggest reasons behind this trend is
some deliberately fraud-friendly design and policy decisions at Google
and Meta.)
The
AI Engineering Report 2026: The AI Acceleration Whiplash - Ten
Takeaways (or maybe not?) The relationship between AI adoption
and defect rate is not flattening as organizations mature their AI
programs; it’s steepening. More AI-generated code in the codebase
correlates with more bugs per developer, and that relationship is
strengthening as adoption deepens.
Mistral
says “Le Chonk” can challenge the best AI models by Joel Khalili.
The stark reminder that the US government could unilaterally revoke
access to frontier-grade AI has created an opening for Mistral, a
Europe-based lab with open-weight models.
Kill
Criteria and Exit Mechanics by Dennis Kennedy. To prevent
experiments from degenerating into zombie projects, leadership must
define clear, operational stopping triggers upfront that mandate hard
decisions.
I know, I know, this blog was largely about the
attribution
cartel for a while, and it seems like my numbers
started to go up while I was doing semi-regular updates on that—so
shouldn’t I be writing about the attribution cartel more?
For now, not much is happening over there. They’re still going
through the motions of trying to make centralized ad attribution
tracking into a web standard. Which is kind of weird, considering that
we should all know by now that centralization on a few USA-based
companies is a bad idea (See Dutch
tax office drops Microsoft 365 cloud for own servers and open source
by Alina Maria Stan. The #Eurostack, so hot right now.)
The attribution numbers are going to agree with what’s politically
expedient for the attribution cartel companies.
The name of this lake is what the US
government says it is
In order to get good ratings from the attribution cartel, sites are
going to have to cover the International
Criminal Court in the politically approved way, too.
George Orwell wrote, The Party told you to reject the evidence of
your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. And
now, the Big Tech CEOs don’t wait to be commanded. On the timeline where
the attribution cartel succeeds, we’ll see that according to the
privacy-preserving attribution tracking, slop
and pro-oligarch sites sell, and legit sites, not so much.
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.
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 meterThe 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.
I don’t usually link to the New York
Times from here, but make a note: Oct. 7, 2026, Section A, Page 20.
Check the print copy at the library if you don’t have other access.
New business openings, e-commerce included, have exploded since the
pandemic, but long-term viability is questionable. Big Tech platforms
like Amazon and Meta are turning the screws on American mom-and-pop
online businesses and empowering deep-pocketed mega-retailers like
Quince, which a Times newsletter called a “well-branded dupe emporium.”
That’s reducing choice for consumers and limiting paths to upward
mobility for millennials like me and generations that follow.
And it only gets worse from there. Meta and Google are already an advertising
duopoly, but the market expects both companies to keep growing at
startup-like rates. Which means taking a bigger and bigger piece out of
every sale.
Sometimes the customer acquisition costs (CAC) jump up quickly, as
the duopoly can pass the costs of any disruption on to the
advertisers.
In 2021, Apple rolled out a new policy that limited iPhone apps’
ability to track user behavior. It was a win for privacy, but it also
made ads on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram less
effective….Researchers found a 39 percent reduction in revenues for
Meta-dependent advertisers as a direct result of the switch, an effect
they noted was felt primarily by small businesses.
In the second quarter this year, Meta’s average price per ad
increased 12 percent over the previous year. These costs aren’t just
shouldered by the business; they get passed on to you, the consumer — an
overlooked answer to the question of why everything is so expensive.
Or maybe if a retail business model depends on the duopoly, it’s not
so much of a business model? The first companies to start using Facebook
for reaching
people on the internet did well for a while. But now that the Meta
ads are costing basically the profit from the sale, at some point the
privacy nerd customers (who aren’t really reachable on the big social
sites) are going to be a hot segment to go after.
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)
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.)
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.
(I don’t know if this site is still on the
blocklists of “inappropriate” content or whatever. This is the meatloaf
recipe that I haven’t been able to share to some people for quite a
while. Possibly it got mixed up with another page that had “hackers” or
“hacking” in the name?)
1 small onion or 1/2 large onion
2 cloves garlic (or more, it’s full of antioxidants)
3-4 pieces wheat bread (stale is fine)
1 lb. ground beef
1/2 tsp. sea salt
1 egg
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Chop the onion and fry in a little oil
until transparent.
While the onion is cooking, break the egg into a bowl. Then pulverize
the bread in the food processor and add to the bowl with the egg.
Pulverize the cooked onion and the garlic, and add to the bowl. Mix in
the remaining ingredients, form into a loaf, and bake.
You can put barbecue sauce on it if you want.
(This is a very simplified and scaled down recipe, based on the one
in Julia Child's The
Way to Cook but with fewer ingredients.)
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.
