Ads That Follow You Home: Has Tapad Cracked The Code Of Cross-Device Advertising?
Advertisers love Tapad because it can track and target you across your desktop, tablet and smartphone. Privacy advocates and Congress? Not so much.
The Clock Is Ticking For The Ad Cookie–With No Sure Alternative In Sight
Cookies are the basis for billions of dollars of online advertising. They’re also under fire from privacy advocates, the government, and even makers of Web browsers. But the key problem is the fragmentation of how people access online content (from phone to computer to tablet and back again).
And so the worries about how advertisers will be able to reach fragmented, increasingly privacy-aware audiences continue to consume the online ad business. Problem is, they haven’t yet come up with solutions–and the clock is ticking.
Panopticlick – A research project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
How unique and trackable is your browser?
Is your browser configuration rare or unique? If so, web sites may be able to track you, even if you limit or disable cookies. “Fingerprinting” may prove a more robust tracking technology than cookies.
Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits.
The Web Cookie Is Dying. Here’s The Creepier Technology That Comes Next
Many Internet advertisers rely on cookies. The problem for marketers is that some users set their browsers to reject cookies or quickly extinguish them. And mobile phones, which are taking an increasing chunk of the Web usage, do not use cookies.
Advertisers and publishers are increasingly turning to something called fingerprinting. It allows a web site to look at the characteristics of a computer such as what plugins and software you have installed, the size of the screen, the time zone, fonts and other features of any particular machine. These form a unique signature just like random skin patterns on a finger.
Ghostery
Ghostery shows you the invisible web : cookies, tags, web bugs, pixels, beacons and companies interested in your activity. Then it helps you learn about those companies, so you can make informed decisions about what you are/aren’t willing to share, and control your online privacy.
After you’ve seen what’s tracking you, you can decide whether or not you want to block any or all of the companies in Ghostery’s library. Are there some marketers you trust, but others you’d rather turn away?
Tapad
What if you could connect with someone across all their screens instead of taking a scattershot approach to content delivery?
Tapad is a proprietary technology that assimilates billions of data points to find the human relationship between smartphones, desktops, laptops, tablets, connected TVs and game consoles. The result: an unprecedented understanding of consumer behavior across related screens and the ability to reach the right people on the right device at the right time.
With Tapad, publishers and advertisers can deepen consumer engagement with a more fluid experience while increasing campaign cost-effectiveness.
Net Threats
Tech experts hope the open structure of the Internet will prevail in the coming decade; but they anticipate battles to preserve relatively unhindered connectivity.
- Actions by nation-states to maintain security and political control will lead to more blocking, filtering, segmentation, and balkanization of the Internet.
- Trust will evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance and likely greater surveillance in the future.
- Commercial pressures affecting everything from Internet architecture to the flow of information will endanger the open structure of online life.
- Efforts to fix the TMI (too much information) problem might over-compensate and actually thwart content sharing.
You, the World and I – Jon Rafman
“I don’t have one single photograph of her, even though we spent the better part of our youth together. She never let anyone take pictures of her. Now that she is gone. I wish more than ever I had some sort of records of our time together. A proof of our love. But I have none.
But it is not entirely true (…).”
Why Facebook is beating the FBI at facial recognition
The FBI is getting set to deploy its own system of computerized facial recognition, called NGI. It will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year.
But compared with Facebook’s DeepFace system it isn’t very good. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they’re the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot. To be fair, Facebook has a whole network’s worth of data on its side.
The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.
Dragnet Nation – Julia Angwin
In this thought-provoking, highly accessible exploration of the issues around personal data-gathering, Julia Angwin provides a startling account of how we’re all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet—and the near impossibility of evading it. I’ll never use Google in the same way again.”
—Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of Happier at Home and The Happiness Project
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