Grace Dean, BBC News:

Ms O’Carroll’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system was covered by the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object.

Meta said that adverts on its platform could only be targeted to groups of a minimum size of 100 people, rather than individuals, so did not count as direct marketing. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) disagreed.

“Organisations must respect people’s choices about how their data is used,” a spokesperson for the ICO said. “This means giving users a clear way to opt out of their data being used in this way.”

Meta, in response, says “no business can be mandated to give away its services for free”, a completely dishonest way to interpret the ICO’s decision. There is an obvious difference between advertising and personalized advertising. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. Sure, personalized advertising makes Meta more money than non-personalized advertising, but that is an entirely different problem. Meta can figure it out. Or it can be a big soggy whiner about it.

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Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

Google launched a new feature in the Google App for iOS named Page Annotation. When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can “extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line.” When you click on them, Google takes you to more search results.

This was announced nearly two weeks ago in a subtle forum post. If there was a press release, I cannot find it. It was only picked up by the press thanks to Schwartz’s November 21 article, but those stories were not published until just before the U.S. Thanksgiving long weekend, so this news was basically buried.

Google is now injecting “Page Annotations”, which are kind of like Skimlinks but with search results. The results from a tapped Page Annotation are loaded in a floating temporary sheet, so it is not like users are fully whisked away — but that is almost worse. In the illustration from Google, a person is apparently viewing a list of Japanese castles, into which Google has inserted a link on “Osaka Castle”. Tapping on an injected link will show Google’s standard search results, which are front-loaded with details about how to contact the castle, buy tickets, and see a map. All of those things would be done better in a view that cannot be accidentally swiped away.

Maybe, you are thinking, it would be helpful to easily trigger a search from some selected text, and that is fair. But the Google app already displays a toolbar with a search button when you highlight any text in this app.

Owners of web properties are only able to opt out by completing a Google Form, but you must be signed into the same Google account you use for Search Console. Also, if a property is accessible at multiple URLs — for example, http and https, or www and non-prefixed — you must include each variation separately.

For Google to believe it has the right to inject itself into third-party websites is pure arrogance, yet it is nothing new for the company. It has long approached the web as its own platform over which it has control and ownership. It overlays dialogs without permission; it invented a proprietary fork of HTML and it pushed its adoption for years. It can only do these things because it has control over how people use the web.

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Competition Bureau Canada:

The Competition Bureau is taking legal action against Google for anti-competitive conduct in online advertising technology services in Canada. Following a thorough investigation, the Bureau has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal that seeks to remedy the conduct for the benefit of Canadians.

This has become a familiar announcement: a consumer protection agency, somewhere in the world, is questioning whether a giant technology conglomerate has abused its power. A dam has burst.

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Anthony Chavez, of Google:

[…] Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.

Oh good — more choices.

Hadley Beeman, of the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group:

Third-party cookies are not good for the web. They enable tracking, which involves following your activity across multiple websites. They can be helpful for use cases like login and single sign-on, or putting shopping choices into a cart — but they can also be used to invisibly track your browsing activity across sites for surveillance or ad-targeting purposes. This hidden personal data collection hurts everyone’s privacy.

All of this data collection only makes sense to advertisers in the aggregate, but it only works because of specifics: specific users, specific webpages, and specific actions. Privacy Sandbox is imperfect but Google could have moved privacy forward by ending third-party cookies in the world’s most popular browser.

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“Conspirador Norteño” in January 2023:

BNN (the “Breaking News Network”, a news website operated by tech entrepreneur and convicted domestic abuser Gurbaksh Chahal) allegedly offers independent news coverage from an extensive worldwide network of on-the-ground reporters. As is often the case, things are not as they seem. A few minutes of perfunctory Googling reveals that much of BNN’s “coverage” appears to be mildly reworded articles copied from mainstream news sites. For science, here’s a simple technique for algorithmically detecting this form of copying.

Kashmir Hill and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times:

Many traditional news organizations are already fighting for traffic and advertising dollars. For years, they competed for clicks against pink slime journalism — so-called because of its similarity to liquefied beef, an unappetizing, low-cost food additive.

Low-paid freelancers and algorithms have churned out much of the faux-news content, prizing speed and volume over accuracy. Now, experts say, A.I. could turbocharge the threat, easily ripping off the work of journalists and enabling error-ridden counterfeits to circulate even more widely — as has already happened with travel guidebooks, celebrity biographies and obituaries.

See, it is not just humans producing abject garbage; robots can do it, too — and way better. There was a time when newsrooms could be financially stable on display ads. Those days are over for a team of human reporters, even if all they do is rewrite rich guy tweets. But if you only need to pay a skeleton operations staff to ensure the robots continue their automated publishing schedule, well that becomes a more plausible business venture.

Another thing of note from the Times story:

Before ending its agreement with BNN Breaking, Microsoft had licensed content from the site for MSN.com, as it does with reputable news organizations such as Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, republishing their articles and splitting the advertising revenue.

I have to wonder how much of an impact this co-sign had on the success of BNN Breaking. Syndicated articles on MSN like these are shown in various places on a Windows computer, and are boosted in Bing search results. Microsoft is increasingly dependent on A.I. for editing its MSN portal with predictable consequences.

“Conspirador Norteño” in April:

The YouTube channel is not the only data point that connects Trimfeed to BNN. A quick comparison of the bylines on BNN’s and Trimfeed’s (plagiarized) articles shows that many of the same names appear on both sites, and several X accounts that regularly posted links to BNN articles prior to April 2024 now post links to Trimfeed content. Additionally, BNN seems to have largely stopped publishing in early April, both on its website and social media, with the Trimfeed website and related social media efforts activating shortly thereafter. It is possible that BNN was mothballed due to being downranked in Google search results in March 2024, and that the new Trimfeed site is an attempt to evade Google’s decision to classify Trimfeed’s predecessor as spam.

The Times reporters definitively linked the two and, after doing so, Trimfeed stopped publishing. Its domain, like BNN Breaking, now redirects to BNNGPT, which ostensibly uses proprietary technologies developed by Chahal. Nothing about this makes sense to me and it smells like bullshit.

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Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica in July 2022 in what I will call “foreshadowing”:

Despite all the negative feedback [over then-recent Instagram changes], Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users see. The company estimates that in 2023, about a third of Instagram and Facebook feeds will be recommended content.

Ed Zitron:

In this document [leaked to Zitron], they discuss the term “meaningful interactions,” the underlying metric which (allegedly) guides Facebook today. In January 2018, Adam Mosseri, then Head of News Feed, would post that an update to the News Feed would now “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” which may explain the chaos (and rot) in the News Feed thereafter.

To be clear, metrics around time spent hung around at the company, especially with regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made changes to manipulate its users to satisfy them. In his book “Broken Code,” Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook “changed its News Feed design to encourage people to click on the reshare button or follow a page when they viewed a post,” with “engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase how often users saw content reshared from people they didn’t know.”

Zitron, again:

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content.

Zitron is a little too eager, for my tastes, to treat Meta’s suggestions of objectionable and controversial posts as deliberate. It seems much more likely the company simply sucks at moderating this stuff at scale and is throwing in the towel.

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

In late 2021, TikTok was on the rise, Facebook interactions were declining after a pandemic boom and young people were leaving the social network in droves. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg assembled a handful of veterans who’d built their careers on the Big Blue app to figure out how to stop the bleeding, including head of product Chris Cox, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, WhatsApp lead Will Cathcart and head of Facebook, Tom Alison.

During discussions that spanned several meetings, a private WhatsApp group, and an eventual presentation at Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto, California, the group came to a decision: The best way to revive Facebook’s status as an online destination for young people was to start serving up more content from outside a person’s network of friends and family.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

These pieces each seem like they are circling a theme of a company finding the upper bound of its user base, and then squeezing it for activity, revenue, and promising numbers to report to investors. Unlike Zitron, I am not convinced we are watching Facebook die. I think Koebler is closer to the truth: we are watching its zombification.

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Louise Matsakis, Big Technology:

Shein and Temu’s users aren’t just browsing. Shein reportedly earned roughly $45 billion last year, and is currently trying to go public. PDD Holdings, Temu’s Chinese parent company, reported earlier this week that its revenue surged more than 130% in the first quarter. PDD is now the most valuable e-commerce company in China.

The two startups are sending so many orders from China to the US that it’s causing air cargo rates to spike, and USPS workers have said publicly that they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Temu’s signature bright orange packages they have to deliver. “I’m tired of this Temu shit, ya’ll killing me,” one mailman said in a TikTok video last year with over two million likes. “Everyday it’s Temu, Temu, Temu — I’m Temu tired.”

You might recognize how both Shein and Temu grew using the same tactic as TikTok: relentless advertising. (Which is something Snap CEO Evan Spiegel complained about despite TikTok’s huge spending on Snapchat.)

Both these companies are an aggressive distillation of plentiful supply and low cost to buyers. For people with lower incomes or who are economically stressed, the extreme affordability they offer can be a lifeline. Not everybody who shops with either fits that description; Matsakis cites a UBS report finding an average Shein customer earns $65,000 per year and spends more than $100 per month on clothes. But there are surely plenty of people who shop on both sites — and Amazon — because they simply cannot afford to buy anywhere else.

Every time I think about these retailers, I cannot shake a pervasive sadness. Saddened by how some people in rich countries have been compromised so much they rely on stores they may have moral qualms with. Saddened by the ripple effect of exploitation. Saddened by the environmental cost of producing, shipping, and disposing of these often brittle products — a wasteful exercise for many customers who can afford longer-lasting goods, and the many people who cannot.

Derek Guy has written about the brutality of the garment industry in the U.S., but notes how clearly different these fast and ultra-fast fashion brands are from inexpensive clothing:

Given the opacity in the supply chain, your best single measure for whether something is amiss is price. If you are paying $5 for a cut-and-sewn shirt, something bad is happening. Does this mean that every expensive shirt was ethically made? No. But you know the $5 shirt is bad.

Guy also wrote about the difference between cheap and fast fashion.

This whole industry bums me out because I try to appreciate clothing and fashion. I like finding things I like, dressing a particular way, and putting some effort into how I present myself. Yet every peek behind the curtain is a mountain of waste and abuse, and the worst offenders are companies like Shein and Temu — and, for what it is worth, AliExpress and facilitators like Amazon.

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Liz Reid, head of Google Search:

People have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs. They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and are more satisfied with their results.

So today, AI Overviews will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. That means that this week, hundreds of millions of users will have access to AI Overviews, and we expect to bring them to over a billion people by the end of the year.

Given the sliding quality of Google’s results, it seems quite bold for the company to be confident users worldwide will trust its generated answers. I am curious to try it when it is eventually released in Canada.

I know what you must be thinking: if Google is going to generate results without users clicking around much, how will it sell ad space? It is a fair question, reader.

Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski, Washington Post:

Google has largely avoided AI answers for the moneymaking searches that host ads, said Andy Taylor, vice president of research at internet marketing firm Tinuiti.

When it does show an AI answer on “commercial” searches, it shows up below the row of advertisements. That could force websites to buy ads just to maintain their position at the top of search results.

This is just one source speaking to the Post. I could not find any corroborating evidence or a study to support this, even on Tinuiti’s website. But I did notice — halfway through Google’s promo video — a query for “kid friendly places to eat in dallas” was answered with an ad for Hopdoddy Burger Bar before any clever A.I. stuff was shown.

Obviously, the biggest worry for many websites dependent on Google traffic is what will happen to referrals if Google will simply summarize the results of pages instead of linking to them. I have mixed feelings about this. There are many websites which game search results and overwhelm queries with their own summaries. I would like to say “good riddance”, but I also know these pages did not come out of nowhere. They are a product of trying to improve website rankings on Google for all searches, and to increase ad and affiliate revenue from people who have clicked through. Neither one is a laudable goal in its own right. Yet anyone who has paid attention to the media industry for more than a minute can kind of understand these desperate attempts to grab attention and money.

Google built entire industries, from recipe bloggers to search optimization experts. What happens when it blows it all up?

Good thing home pages are back.

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