25 Oct 2026
Locked in to Rewarded Interest?
previously: CCPA and CIPA on the same site. It is possible to comply with both “flavors” of California privacy law—CCPA and CIPA—by setting up one flow for the Global Privacy Control users, and another flow for people who prefer cross-context personalized advertising. One question, though. Would everybody who wants personalized ads be locked in to Rewarded Interest?
The second option I covered includes Rewarded Interest (which just came out in Apple’s App Store, by the way. Pretty straightforward answer to the problem of how to provide personalized ads to Apple users who want them.)
But there is only one Rewarded Interest, and GPC users can choose any browser. By January all the browsers are going to have to offer it.
Rewarded Interest doesn’t have lock-in, though. It is designed to integrate with the existing OpenRTB web ads. And there’s nothing preventing some competitor from offering their own user ID system that plugs in to OpenRTB the same way.
One company is an obvious contender to offer an alternative ID—and they’re already well-known as a fast follower on software.
Amazon has buy-side adtech, Amazon Ads Agent, a ready-to-go integration for their version of CMAID, whatever they call it.
Amazon has plenty of bonus offers to reward people for their data, so they don’t have to pay out all rewards in cash.
Amazon already has a first-party relationship with most households in the USA.
So the answer is no. People who choose personalization will end up with more than one option. They’ll pick an ID to use based on which one gives them the best deal. I don’t know if that will be Amazon or someone else. This is a competition problem for Rewarded Interest, not a lock-in problem for the people who choose personalized ads.
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.