Overview: Communications Tactics

Good intro to what Apple and Google are doing in the privacy space to fend off regulation. TL:DR; "Get ready for more random ads online, higher prices and subscriptions galore. But your privacy concerns may still not fade."Apple kicked this off in 2017 with a new Safari preventing the technology used by marketing companies to follow peop…

Good history of the digital ad industry, from 3rd-party tracking cookies through to today's data-brokered behavioural advertising profiles:"Digital advertisers have steadily transformed the internet into a surveillance machine from which there is no escape... argue that ... universe of on demand digital content has created a crisis of at…

Privacy Zuckering... when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to... Facebook... paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” ... “dark patterns,” ... particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privac…

Most cookie consent pop-ups ... are likely to be flouting regional privacy laws... another piece of research ... also concluded a majority of ... cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe’s Internet users — even though EU law requires one...if it’s configured to contain pre-ticked boxes that opt users into sharing data by default — requi…

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches ... target them with get-out-the-vote ads...“geofencing” or “ring-fencing.”... data ... is anonymized. But ... potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users... virtual fence around a geog…

Mozilla announced a new anti-tracking strategy... make it harder to track users across websites ... on by default for all users... There needs to be a profitable revenue ecosystem on the web... Our third-party cookie restrictions will allow loading of advertising ... will prevent the cookie-based tracking ... a better balance for publishers than…

analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps... Only Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” registers a more challenging readability score than Facebook’s privacy policy... The vast majority of privacy policies exceed the college reading level... [Google's] policy became more readable at the …

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

Snowden, Snowfalled: an awesome HTML5 interactive feature.