Happy #buyNothingDay, and a goal for 2020
29 November 2019
Happy #buyNothingDay!
To be honest, though, I buy stuff the other 365 days of the year (2020 is scheduled to be a leap year) so I still get and pay attention to advertising.
In 2020, I'm going to see what I can do to get better ads. It seems like this is a good year to do it. Let's review. There are three ways to get an ad in front of me.
Context: pay for something I want to read
Search: deliver the ads with search results when I search for something
Personalization: place the ad based on who I am
I'm fine with the first two. Context-based advertising pays for news and cultural works.
Search advertising pays for services I use, like web search and mobile maps.
The third one, though, is a problem. The first two are positive-sum games between me and the advertiser, and have positive externalities. Personalization is a negative-sum game, and has negative externalities.
What if I treat every personalized ad I receive as a bug, and report it?
In 2020, thanks to the California Consumer Privacy Act, I should be able to opt out of the use of my personal information for ad targeting. In the long run, when advertisers figure out that I'm impossible to reach with personalization, they'll pay more for the news, cultural works, and services I want, and spend less money storing my information where it exposes me to risks like fraud and identity theft.
Here's my CCPA letter. Work in progress: California Consumer Privacy Act letter
Comments and suggestions welcome. Anyway, long weekend, longer bonus links section.
Bonus links
Get Started With a Web Components Grid in 5 Minutes
How Much Did Russian Spy Agencies Rely On Bitcoin? New Hints In Leaked Recordings
Appellate Court Supports the Power of the State over Local Control of Housing
I Went On a Propaganda Tour of an Amazon Warehouse
CNAME Cloaking, the dangerous disguise of third-party trackers
Firing 4 Google Workers Is 'Illegal Retaliation,' Organizers Say
Senate Dems Have A New Privacy Bill That Could Be The Blueprint For A Federal Law
My remarks at the town hall on Friday, November 22
Consumer Reports Labs is hiring 8 staffers: technologists, journalists and wonks
Care About Journalism? Maybe You Should Cancel Your Newspaper
Google’s Next Moonshot: Union Busting
Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Permanently Maiming Employees
Firefox browser will block the IAB’s DigiTrust universal ID
Good and not Evil: the Advent of Ethos Licensing
Republicans are buying rooftop solar. Will it change their politics?
How We Did It: Heat And Income In U.S. Cities
Worker-Owned Apps Are Trying to Fix the Gig Economy's Exploitation
How Facebook fueled a precious-metal scheme targeting older conservatives
Ultrasound Signals – Why Epic Blocks Inaudible Audio
Why Don’t We Consider Labor-Intensive, Blue-Collar Businesses to Be Start-Ups?
20 Years After Columbine, The Mass Killing Still Isn’t Considered Far-Right Violence
GitHub is trying to quell employee anger over its ICE contract. It's not going well
The great American tax haven: why the super-rich love South Dakota
Basecamp now has a totally free version to help you manage personal projects
The everything town in the middle of nowhere
Scientists plan to flood black market with fake rhino horn to reduce poaching
In Germany, focusing on this metric let a newspaper increase reader loyalty (and subscribers too)
Even Inflation Is Worse If You’re Poor
Neural Networks seem to follow a puzzlingly simple strategy to classify images
Robots aren’t taking warehouse employees’ jobs, they’re making their work harder
Microsoft Is Going To Pretend CCPA Is The Privacy Law Of The Land – Because There Isn’t One
The wonderful world of Chinese hi-fi
Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
OpenAI has published the text-generating AI it said was too dangerous to share
New York Times Will Pull Programmatic Ads From Mobile App Next Year
A Simple Question No One In Ad Tech Will Answer
Yes, progressive enhancement is a fucking moral argument
How The Texas Tribune is revamping its sponsored content (and folding its five-year-old op-ed site)
This Trippy T-Shirt Makes You Invisible to AI
Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week. Productivity jumped by 40%
In historic shift, SALT LAKE TRIBUNE gets IRS nonprofit approval...
