Category Archives: Advertising
Twitter and Statutory Notions of Privacy
Given the norms of digital networks such as Twitter, which emphasis sharing and collective knowledge development, is a control metaphor accompanied by a strong regulatory body well suited for developing a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ in Cyberspace? I would suggest that they are not, at least not as presented by these texts. Continue reading
Follow-up: Newspapers and Business Models
I’m not trying to suggest that all ‘big media’ journalism is bad. At the same time, few editors (now) want to actually spend the money on deep investigative reporting (or, alternately, have the budgets to afford such investigative work) – most reporting is a quick noting of facts at a surface level. The problem (as I see it) is that when news sites close themselves off from the world they are asserting that they will rely on a business model that, at this point, has failed them. Continue reading
Thoughts: Google and ‘Interest Based’ Advertising
I’ve made references to Google and privacy in a variety of blog posts , but whenever I think about Google my mind returns to a comment from Peter Fleischer, the chief privacy officer for Google. … If your users don’t trust you, you’re out of business ( Source ) Perhaps naively, I think that this statement is accurate – look at the nightmares that Facebook, NebuAd, and Phorm (to name a few) all have when they ‘invade’ customers’ privacy without being fully transparent about what, and why, they are engaging in their practices. … While I’m not a fan of behavioral ads, and don’t think that Google’s solution would eliminate all of the concerns, this is the first time that a company has offered an easily understood, easily used, opt-out system in a reasonably transparent fashion (something that certainly can’t be said about either NebuAd or Phorm). Continue reading
DPI Deployed for Mobile Advertising
( Source ) Deep Packet Inspection is being deploying by an increasing number of operators for a host of purposes, including content analysis, flow analysis, network management (broadly stated), network management as integrated with policy management, and behavioural advertising (to name a few). … The Guardian is reporting that in a recent GSMA trial to collect information of where mobile users’ are browsing, that “the UK’s five networks – 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – used deep packet inspection technology to collect data covering about half the UK’s entire mobile web traffic” ( Source ). … Even in the case of Phorm, there are countermeasures that individuals can take to mitigate their data being identified and sorted – what solutions will be made available to mobile consumers, or is the fact that these are ‘different devices’ mean that old solutions will be seen as not applying? Continue reading
