Advertising

Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners’ locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners’ knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known CA-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly — LocationSmart and Zumigo.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our polit

Several major acquisitions have helped Google and Facebook on their way to unprecedented dominance over the advertising supply chain, antitrust analysts argued at the Open Markets Institute forum. There are six acquisitions that experts cited as missed opportunities by regulators at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to curb the advertising market dominance of Google and Facebook.

AT&T will soon offer a new streaming video service thanks to its acquisition of Time Warner, and it will be buying more companies in order to beef up its advertising platform, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. The streaming service will be free for AT&T mobile customers who subscribe to unlimited data plans and $15 a month for everyone else. AT&T will announce more acquisitions soon to improve its advertising system.

The House Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee drilled down on targeted digital advertising. Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta (R-OH) said the idea behind the hearing was to look at the benefits as well as the "emerging, high-profile challenges" of digital advertising, including the Russian election influence ads that have drawn calls, and some action, for better identifying who is placing those digital ads. The use of the word "challenges" was telling. Other legislators have labeled them "scandals" or "problems" in need of government fixes. Subcommittee 

The Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees rleased nearly 500 pages of information Facebook provided concerning more than 2,000 questions from lawmakers on topics including its policies on user data, privacy and security. Yet much of the information that Facebook included was not new and the social network sidestepped providing detailed answers, in a move that may embolden some of its critics.

Three hours into an interrogation by British lawmakers, Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive Alexander Nix stood up and thrust a slide deck at Members of Parliament: “I’ve tried,” he said, “to take what is ostensibly quite a complex structure and simplify it.” His four slides told a straightforward story about the analytics company, which shot to prominence after it was found to have used data from millions of Facebook users in political campaigns.

[Commentary] Requiring the targeting data label on ads is just a simple way of bringing the shadowy business of data collection and ad targeting into the light of day. If Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are sure that there is nothing wrong with harvesting users’ personal data to place ads, they should have no problem with being completely open with consumers about the real costs of the “free” service their company provides. Internet advertisers may complain that ad targeting is a complicated business and that the targeting of one ad may rely on many pieces of user data. Well, so be it.