But it’s worse than it appears

The even worse part is that a brand with a high blocking rate that’s looking at conventional adtech/martech metrics is going to be looking at data from an unrepresentative, more trackable fraction of the audience. And the higher the block rate, the worse that any decisions based on that data are going to be.

More later.

Related

Good morning, AdExchanger

We still have time to save the halo effect

B L O C K in the U S A

Google stole a damn sammich

Winners don’t click search ads

Bonus links

BuzzFeed Stock in Free Fall as Pivot to AI Blows Up in Its Face by Victor Tangermann. (There was only one BuzzFeed News but management is discovering that anybody can make slop.)

Publicis closes $2.2bn LiveRamp deal, betting ‘neutral’ tech can still be a competitive advantage by Cameron Clarke. Given LiveRamp’s widespread use across the advertising industry, the question of its neutrality has been one of the deal’s hottest talking points since it was announced in May. (But a brand that focuses on early adopters should look at their customers’ use of UOOMs, authorized agents, and Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP). You can’t assume that all audiences are equally well represented in LiveRamp.)

Big Tech claims voters’ AI backlash is “anti-Trump” not “anti-tech” by Ashley Belanger. (File this one under “cool story bro.” They’re the same thing. Trump is a cryptocurrency and social media tycoon—he’s as much a “tech CEO” as any of the rest.)

More from Texas Linux Fest

Texas Linux Fest 2026 Observations by Borislav Sabotinov. Stable enterprise distributions, design for reducing AI errors, cloud workspaces for developers, home labs, and more.

Bonus links

From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet by Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw, and Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons by Lisa Macpherson and Anna Tumadóttir. (Will collaborative projects survive scraper bots and slop input?)

Everyone Everywhere Hated Meta’s New AI Training Terms. Now, They’re On Pause by Samantha Cole. (Where there’s a privacy violation against individual users, there’s probably some kind of racket being run against companies. Google stole a damn sammich.)

It’s Time For City Builders To Embrace Productive Chaos by Eden Kupermintz. (Fan theory: politics lags gaming rules. We have new urbanism today because of what worked in SimCity.)

Abstract

The story of open source and the Internet is a story of dystopia timelines that didn’t happen. We avoided the Clipper Chip, key escrow. And the Fritz Chip, DRM mandates. Sure, threats to security, and DRM lock-in, are still there, but thanks to a lot of hard work, they’re manageable. Today’s biggest threat, though, isn’t coming from outside forces like governments or big copyright holders. Our ongoing collapse of trust and rise of crime is rooted in some good ideas from open source, gone wrong.

It’s not just social media scams and deepfakes. Dishonest business practices from the sketchier corners of the Internet have gone mainstream. We’re in a rugpull economy now. Let’s figure out where we went wrong and how to get back on track.

Intro

I was going to give my practical privacy tips talk, but then it turned out that they gave me the big room, so I wanted to think about the big picture.

Why are we doing privacy tips in the first place? Why not: How to share more of your personal information with brands you love? Why is privacy even a feature?

Privacy is not about something to hide. In a lot of situations, the reason we have privacy is that it makes a market work. Imagine you go on vacation, and go to an old-fashioned rug market. Are you going to hand every rug merchant your shopping list, budget, and departure date?

The basics of privacy are like the basics of not showing your cards in a card game. When privacy breaks down, a lot of other human activities break down, including markets.

Normie corporate privacy

And, of course, there are a lot of deceptive people out there. So the stuff that we used to do as privacy nerds has gotten all mainstream and corporate.

The Federal Trade Commission says scams are up 3x since 2020.

The Pew Research Center, in Online Scams and Attacks in America Today, says that 73% of U.S. adults have experienced some kind of online scam or attack.

When you give up too much information, you make it too easy to target you. Scams you’re likely to believe, malware that looks like software you want, whatever. So the kind of privacy advice I used to share with privacy nerds is now part of mainstream corporate IT best practices. CSO Online recommends:

• Push a vetted ad-blocking extension to managed browsers through policy rather than leaving it to users to install it.

• Favor browsers with built-in tracking protection.

• 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.

Wherefore do the wicked prosper?

How did it get so far?

The prophet Jeremiah asked,

Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?

That’s not what I expected the Internet would get us. The Internet, and free software, were going to be awesome. I started running desktop Linux in 1994, back when you had to exit your own X mode lines, and you could zorch your (tube) monitor if you got it wrong. Yes, that was actually a thing.

Linux and the Internet kept getting better.

Internet 2, dystopia 0

The open source scene has beaten some powerful dystopia narratives.

• Cryptography key escrow (the “Clipper Chip”). From 1993 to 1996, US policy was to assert control over encryption, and require a back door for the government. See Privacy’s Defender by Cindy Cohn for the inside story on how the freedom-loving side beat that one.

• DRM mandates (the “Fritz Chip”) The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, introduced in 2002, was the high-water mark of the DRM dystopia story.

Encryption backdoors and DRM are both still around, but last I checked the one remaining device in my house that will play DVDs is one of the Linux boxes. Both have gone from extinction-level threat to manageable problem.

Yes, we still need to get political and stay political to keep them from coming back, but for now, open source and the Internet have won.

Now the dystopia is coming from inside the house

But now we have dystopia at home.

A public service announcement from the FBI says “cyber criminals are using search engine advertisement services to impersonate brands and direct users to malicious sites.

And the FBI recommends installing an ad blocker. We are on the way to an new kind of dystopia when a major law enforcement agency of the USA is saying that a major company in the USA is doing so much crime you got to just block them. So how did we get here?

Today’s scam and surveillance dystopia has its roots in the open source scene.

We can still beat this one, and this time it’s really on us.

From open source to surveillance dystopia by way of economics

Commoditize the complement was awesome back in the days of “old Google.” Replace expensive single-vendor systems with Linux, plus whatever hardware works best at the time for a reasonable price.

Hardware as a commodity was a good idea. The problem happened when “content” was treated as a commodity. Adtech constantly tries to get the most expensive possible ad into the cheapest possible context.

For adtech, surveillance was never about the surveillance. It was about connecting the reader of some expensive content to some other context where you could show them an ad for cheaper.

A recent paper shows I’m right. A Longitudinal Study of Extended User IDs in the Online Advertising Ecosystem, by Michael Smith, Riley Grossman, Krzysztof Franaszek, Antonio Torres-Agüero, Pritam Sen, Cristian Borcea, and Yi Chen, describes how web trackers are giving “user IDs” to bots. If it were about the surveillance, this would have been a big deal. But it wasn’t. (A small mention in AdExchanger, that’s about it.) Adtech is a racket against the web publisher.

Why did advertising-supported web sites turn out to be so hard?

The old magazine business model was something like this: subscriptions cover the cost of printing and postage, and ads pay for the content. Without printing and postage, the ads should pay for things. But it didn’t work.

Walt Mossberg recalled,

[W]e were seated next to the head of this advertising company, who said to me something like, “Well, I really always liked AllThingsD and in your first week I think Recode’s produced some really interesting stuff.” And I said, “Great, so you’re going to advertise there, right? Or place ads there.” And he said, “Well, let me just tell you the truth. We’re going to place ads there for a little bit, we’re going to drop cookies, we’re going to figure out who your readers are, we’re going to find out what other websites they go to that are way cheaper than your website and then we’re gonna pull our ads from your website and move them there.”

The first generation of adtech was all about good ad, bad context.

But then it got worse.

The “progress” of online advertising was in creating ever more efficient auction-based markets, to match an ad to a user in real time. In 2006, Jakob Nielsen pointed out the problem with those, in Search Engines as Leeches on the Web. An auction-based market tends to capture all the advertisers’ profits, as they bid up the price of ads to where the cost of the ad equals the expected profit from additional customer.

As the auction gets more and more efficient, some slots go un-sold. Which explains why Big Tech systems are now deliberately designed to match scammers and victims.

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.

Scam bidders don’t just fill in the ad impressions to the people normal advertisers don’t want (or, that Google and Meta ML “learns” not to serve normal ads to). Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, but those fraudulent advertisers are also acting as shill bidders to drive up the auction prices for the legit advertisers.

Meta makes 10% of ad revenue from fraud directly—but possibly much more because the bidding functions representing all the other ads must pay more in order to outbid the numerous scams. If Meta is so good at AI then what’s this doing here?

Number must go up

Advertising revenue globally is about a trillion dollars, hard to estimate, maybe a little more. Meta and Google ad revenue, added together, is about half that. 580 billion if you add their Q2 2026 revenue and annualize it (multiply the quarterly number by four). The only way left to grow is to keep taking a bigger and bigger fraction of every sale, and the way to do that to keep dumping more good ads into bad contexts, and scam and malware ads everywhere.

A majority of a major industry is now controlled by two transnational crime organizations.

Crime is inevitable for Meta and Google now that they control a majority of advertising but must continue to grow at startup-like rates.

Excuses, excuses

But this platform, it’s so big! This is why you don’t hire a Big Tech CEO to manage a Burger King. “There are so many Burger Kings with so many customers! How could we possibly mop all the restrooms?” You just have to hire enough people. And if the rules of the platform ad “game” were less scam-friendly, less work by employees would be required anyway.

But union busting! Don’t Big Tech CEOs hate hiring moderators? Especially moderators who unionize? The crime is built in to the rules of the ad system, not just in the amount of work invested.

The problem isn’t scale or labor/management issues. The problem is deliberate design and policy decisions. Two good examples are:

• The Google trademark policy is designed to deliver scams and malware in search ads. Google stole a damn sammich

• Meta’s ad system is designed to work for deceptive sellers. but I want to turn people into dinosaurs

What legit brands need from advertising

Advertising works when

content + signal ≥ interruption + resources + risk

Advertising can provide two benefits to the audience: it can support some kind of resource (which technically doesn’t have to be “content,” bus bench ads are a thing, too) and it can send a credible signal of the advertiser’s intentions in the market.

And advertising asks the audience to pay, with some kind of interruption—otherwise it would be not advertising, but content marketing—and spend some kind of resources, such as battery and bandwidth, and often accept some kind of risk.

Michael Farmer points out that:

• The 2009-2024 sales growth rate of 40 out of 60 major advertisers has been very depressed, averaging (as a group) only 2% per year for 15 years.

• By contrast, the market had real GDP growth of 2.4% per year plus inflation of 2.3% per year — so the benchmarked nominal GDP growth rate was 4.7% per year.

Advertising has stopped working for legit brands, and very few people in the ad industry have paid attention. So much crime, so little pay.

What I was wrong about

I thought that legit brands would want some form of post-creepy advertising, designed for honest sellers. What I did was point out the ad medium/brand mismatch. I did say that today’s surveillance 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 decision-makers for the highest-reputation brands would be dissatisfied enough with the situation to 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.

But I was wrong about ad reform. Brands let their quality and reputation slide in order to match the available advertising, not the other way around.

Bernadette Banner, an expert in historic garments and in making and altering clothing in general, did a video on selecting fabrics. But in a rugpull economy, that’s harder than it looks.

The unfortunate reality is that those sorts of recommendations do not stand the test of time The recommendation section will become obsolete especially when shops start going out of business, especially the really highly recommended small businesses. Or with bigger more reliable brands it’s very common that these get bought up by private equity and become enshittified and so their quality degrades.

So what can we do about it?

This is our mess to clean up.

We’re not going to get off the Internet and touch grass. Get to the public library and volunteer to help people get their privacy issues fixed.

TODO add link to Alameda library drop-in help sessions.

Privacy is a collective problem. It’s not personal. We’re all safer when less money is flowing to scammers and to Big Tech.

And people inside big companies want to do the right thing, you just have to be able to justify it. I still think Google could go legit again.

The jury system can save us (again)

A December 17, 2002 jury verdict was, in my opinion, the end of the DRM dystopia narrative. In a Not guilty verdict, the jury straight-up jury nullified the anticircumvention section of the DMCA.

Today, juries are handing over some pretty good privacy verdicts. Thanks to the California legislature, we have some good tools to use against surveillance dystopia, and other states do too.

The fight against surveillance and scam dystopia does not have to be prohibitively expensive.

More: Audience Q&A

Election news

Monique Priestley has been elected to the state Senate in Vermont, representing Orange County. Yes, this week was a big election for the Internet, but this particular result is encouraging in another way.

I spent $0 supporting Meta & Google which earns billions of dollars annually off of unchecked fraud and scams, supports child s*xual abuse material (CSAM) websites with ad placements, and seeks to addict and manipulate people of all ages. I spent $0 on targeted ads abusing your sensitive data (your phone number, IQ, education level, annual income, and political leanings, as examples)….My campaign used privacy-protective, non-traditional platforms to fundraise and manage voter information.

It’s possible to win without Google and Meta.

And that’s good. Brazil isn’t the only country that’s going to have to come up with a way to protect people from the various harms that these companies inflict, and their influence on politics. Just having them steal your sandwich is getting off lightly.

Here in the USA, most of the potential for improvement is at the state level, at least for now.

States are going after Meta and Google about a variety of bad behavior, including privacy violations and mental health issues resulting from habit-forming design. But if you grab on to one of these problems and really follow it backward, it turns out that every harm perpetrated against a user is the result of some scheme being run against an advertiser. Google didn’t set out to steal your sandwich—that was a side effect of policy changes made to unfairly drive up the price of search ads, above what legit restaurants would pay.

A solid advertiser protection law would end up mostly helping consumers, by cutting off user harms at the root. (Related: a privacy law shortcut)

In The answer to fighting ad fraud goes further than regulators’ proposals, Rob Leathern from InfoHawk is partly right about ad libraries. But every ad needs to be in a library, and every user of the platform needs to be able to see it. Privacy is about collective safety. A library only for “qualified organizations” is not enough—if Big Tech knows anything about existing qualified organizations, it’s how to subvert or neutralize them. A new trademark enforcer or NGO with a better algorithm, or an investigator on a trial engagement from a legit advertiser needs to be able to sniff around without warning. And platforms have enough bandwidth to make life hell for owners of small business websites, they should be able to host ad libraries with some of it.

More: Surviving the rugpull economy: notes and links from my talk at Texas Linux Fest

Bonus links

Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House? by Brian Krebs. Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

Has YouTube lost its cap? Why is Google allowing so many dubious ads? by Gordon Young. How many of these commercials would ever be cleared to run on conventional television? (icymi: cleaning up YouTube. Ever notice how YouTubers will promote sponsors, sell merch, ask people to join their Patreon, even follow them on other video services…but nobody says anything about turning the surveillance ads back on?)

Bonus links

Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends by Bret Devereaux. (Is it possible to make a playable World War II game where the Axis has a chance—without changing the economic rules to make it so that, in-game, totalitarian states are not dumb and bad?)

Google admits AI search makes less money, but it’s fixing that with more ads by Ryan Whitwam. As part of the financial disclosure, Google announced an expansion of ads in AI Mode. If you do decide to dip into Google’s search chatbot, you’ll probably see more contextual advertising. These ads will begin appearing in more international markets soon.

Related

It’s the death of the price tag, finished off by AI pricing by Bob Sullivan. If it feels like everything you do today is a video game with surprise gremlins attacking at every turn, that’s because—it is. Booby traps are everywhere. You can’t so much as buy a coffee, an avocado, or a curtain rod without you and your data being entered into a cynical value extraction experiment.

Bonus links

Turning an Old Phone’s Motherboard into an RC Plane Controller by Maya Posch. The smartphone was bought used for $23, with the default Xiaomi ROM overwritten by LineageOS to get a more lightweight and up to date Android installation on it.

Even more ads are coming to Google search, Google says by Matt Binder. (You still have to block these, at least according to the FBI. Winners don’t click search ads)

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.

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. (A list of the publisher lawsuits targeting Google’s ad tech practices) But somehow they have to not waste it.

In Who Will Stand Up For The Open Web?, James Hercher summarizes the conventional wisdom.

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.

More later.

Bonus links

How Google is Pushing Scam Videos on Elderly and Cognitively Impaired People by Nathan J. Robinson. (On the Internet, the more complicated the math they try to snow you with, the more basic the underlying racket really is.)

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.

Bonus links

Cybersecurity bounty hunter says Samsung TVs use AI to record audio and screenshots for ads — ‘Finally found a company that truly listens to its customers,’ says hacker by Jhet Borja. (consumer tip: buy a smart TV now, while the surveillance-subsidized price is still in effect)

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.

Advertisers Pull Meta Ads That Had Unwanted AI Glow-ups b Trishla Ostwal (See previous link. Meta has access to the kind of technology that can do projects like that, and they use it to…make ads that misrepresent the product, with any and all risks on the advertiser. And block political accounts: Van Hollen Demands Answers From Zuckerberg Over No Kings Accounts, Battle over Meta’s alleged Bolsonaro bias intensifies days before Brazil presidential runoff)

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.

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.

1. Check for a consent cookie (or a logged-on user who has already consented). If consent is on, go to step 6.

2. Check GPC. If it’s on, go to step 7.

3. Show the consent dialog, along with CCPA and CalOPPA required features such as link to privacy policy.

4. Is Rewarded Interest running? Rewarded Interest suppresses the consent dialog and shares CMAID. Go to step 6.

5. User makes a choice. If the user declines consent, go to step 8.

6. Set or refresh the consent cookie. Load cross-context tracking scripts. END.

7. Acknowledge the user’s GPC in the page footer.

8. 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?

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.

More on this area (by me, in AdExchanger) Take A Break, Compliance Nerds. Privacy Is A Research Problem Now

Bonus links

Hackers built a ‘Skynet mode’ agent that hijacks other people’s AI models to run its attacks by Ravi Gill. Someone has built a hacking agent that borrows its brain. It hunts the internet for AI models left open to strangers, hijacks one and uses it to plan and run attacks, while the model’s owner pays for every step.

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.

U.K. politicians and German publishers call on regulators to pause Meta’s new terms before October 30 deadline by Hanaa’ Tameez. The largest news publishing trade association in the United States is calling on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend the implementation of the company’s new commercial terms of service, set to go into effect on October 30.

AI Recipe Slop Networks Are Being Monetized Through Russian and Chinese Ad Tech from DecryptAds. In this report alone we found ads from brands including Adobe, HBO Max, Siemens, Subaru, The Wall Street Journal, Capital One, Sam’s Club, LinkedIn, Google Workspace, Tumi, Pepsi, Anker and VRBO running on these sites.

Accident Or Not, The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn’t Rent Your Megaphone From Zuck by Mike Masnick. (I believe it was a bug in the ML system, and I also believe the Big Tech firms do have a list of accounts that they will fix bugs for very quickly—but who gets on that list is political.)

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)

The view from outside the marketing filter bubble

Check out the coverage in CSO Online 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. More: your server will be right with you

Related

Lessons Learned From ‘AdFection’ and What To Do Next | Electronic Frontier Foundation by By Bill Budington and Thorin Klosowski. (Similar advice to CSO’s. The IT industry and the Internet NGOs mostly agree on this issue—adtech is the outlier.)

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 Ukraine’s data center strikes affect Russia’s 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.)

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.

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.

More: CCPA and CIPA on the same site

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.