AT&T to end targeted ads program, give all users lowest available price:
AT&T is getting rid of Internet Preferences, the controversial program that analyzes home Internet customers’ Web browsing habits in order to serve up targeted ads.
“To simplify our offering for our customers, we plan to end the optional Internet Preferences advertising program related to our fastest Internet speed tiers,“ an AT&T spokesperson confirmed to Ars today. "As a result, all customers on these tiers will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area. We’ll begin communicating this update to customers early next week.”
Data collection and targeted ads will be shut off, AT&T also confirmed.
Source: Ars Technica
Uh Oh: Google Expands Its Ad Tracking. But, Yay: It’s Opt-In:
IF YOU’RE A Google user—and who isn’t these days—you’ll soon get a notification suggesting you check in on your security settings. You definitely want to do this, because there’s a major change in there. Even more major? That Google has made it opt-in.
Source: Wired
Geo-targeted harassment is the new frontier of the anti-abortion movement:
The campaign, she said, was so successful that Bethany already has plans to expand it.
“Making a decision to have an abortion—there’s a fairly small window to making that decision. For example, if you have a 1-800 number [ad] and they click on it, you’re instantaneously connected,” Flynn told Pregnancy Help News. “It’s one person staring at one screen all day, and to put info on that screen is pretty powerful.”
The law may keep anti-choice activists 100 feet away from a clinic, but there is no virtual fence to keep them from entering the intimate space inside your phone. It is a digital loophole that allows activist rhetoric to reach women during trying times. There is one fix though: turn off location tracking on your phone.
Source: fusion.net
How a Senator used Facebook ads to influence employees in a single D.C. building:
For a glimpse into just how precise Facebook ad targeting is getting, look to Washington, D.C. Specifically look to 1849 C Street, N.W., a few blocks from the White House, where you’ll find the headquarters for the Department of the Interior, the federal agency tasked with managing national parks, federal land and natural resources.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has been trying for years to convince the Interior Department to allow Alaska to build a 11-mile road through a wildlife refuge to make two remote towns in the state more easily accessible. But the Interior Department has balked, citing environmental concerns; the area is a habitat for migratory birds.
In order to convince Department officials to change their minds, Murkowski recently targeted them—and only them—with a video ad on Facebook, reports Alaska Dispatch News.
Source: fusion.net
News Sites Are Tracking Your Web Traffic Way More Than Porn Sites:
Using a custom open-source measurement tool, Princeton researchers analyzed the top 1 million websites ranked by the web analytics firm Alexa. What they found is that news sites load far more third-party trackers than sites in other categories including sports, games and even, yes—porn.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that the sites that load the most unique trackers tend to be ones that publish content and are dependent on advertising revenue (like Motherboard), whereas those with the least amount belong to universities, non-profit entities, and other organizations that likely receive outside funding.
The one surprising exception is porn sites, which despite being ad-dependent still load dramatically less trackers than news sites, almost by an order of magnitude. Overall, however, the data suggests the number of unique trackers is actually consolidating, with many of the most common trackers being controlled by the same entities—Google and Facebook in particular.
Source: Vice Magazine
Advertising pays for a lot of what you see on the Internet. This makes ad blockers a big deal. Readers are using them. Advertisers are panicking about them. Publishers are attempting to quash them. Meanwhile, ad blockers market themselves as a way to speed up web browsing while you skirt evil data collectors and attention-hungry advertisers. But ad blockers are running businesses too. And their business models aren’t too far off from the very ones that publishers and advertisers use to make money on the web.
Source: Wired
Shops could soon be targeting ads according to your feet:
If the prospect of having intelligent cameras pointed at your face makes you want to grab a crowbar and start smashing all the mirrors in the department store, there’s an alternative for you: intelligent cameras pointed at your feet.
Hoxton Analytics is a London-based team of data scientists that have developed a technology that makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to categorise people based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of people’s footwear as they walk past the sensor, the system can make real-time judgments on demographic and footfall. The company claims it can identify a customer’s gender with between 75-80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, tells me that the focus of the system came about in part as a reaction to facial recognition.
“My idea was, why don’t we simply consider the clothes someone’s wearing to understand demographics,” he said. “If I just showed you a shot of someone’s body you could probably tell me what gender they are without having to take personal information. However, it turns out pointing a camera at someone’s chest or hips is just as privacy invasive and feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was – what about people’s shoes?”
Source: theguardian.com
In the age of the internet of things, where all kinds of old-fashioned devices and technologies are now connecting to the net, everything can be hacked, including cars, cities, parking garages, and wind turbines. Now, a security researcher has proven this adage once more, finding a way to turn off the lights on tens of thousands of billboards by taking advantage of some flaws in an Android app designed to control the billboards’ lighting system.
Over the summer, Randy Westergren, an independent security researcher, found that the Android app for SmartLink, a system to remotely control billboards’ night lighting,had a series of bugs in its API. These bugs allowed any malicious hacker to easily shut off the lights on any billboard in the SmartLink system, which is provided by a company called OutdoorLink, as Westergren explained in a blog post published on Sunday.
Earlier this year, someone hacked a video billboard to display one of the internet’s most shocking and disgusting memes. But the flaws revealed by Westergren show that even old-fashioned analog billboards can be hacked, although indirectly.
Source: Vice Magazine
Say 15 years from now a particular brand of weight loss supplements obtains a particular girl’s information and locks on. When she scrolls through her Facebook, she sees pictures of rail-thin celebrities, carefully calibrated to capture her attention. When she turns on the TV, it automatically starts on an episode of “The Biggest Loser,” tracking her facial expressions to find the optimal moment for a supplement commercial. When she sets her music on shuffle, it “randomly” plays through a selection of the songs which make her sad. This goes on for weeks.
Now let’s add another layer. This girl is fourteen, and struggling with depression. She’s being bullied in school. Having become the target of a deliberate and persistent campaign by her technology to undermine her body image and sense of self-worth, she’s at risk of making some drastic choices.
This scenario is a long time from being reality, but it raises issues which are worth thinking about now. The question of who bears responsibility for safeguarding the wellbeing of those targeted by marketing using affective computing is a significant one.
Source: hopesandfears.com