Commonplace
This commonplace is an archive of articles, notes and quotes from books and the web.
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5 February 2023
Bob Hoffman (emphasis my own):
The advertising industry was successful for many decades finding appropriate targets for advertisers without spying on the public. But the online ad industry claims that tracking is an essential part of their business model. This is the equivalent of saying that online advertising is such a weak force that the only way the industry can survive is if it is allowed to spy on the public.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, advertising is necessary for the continued operation of the free web as we know it. But tracking is not. The problem is not advertising. The problem is tracking.
The IAB and other trade groups have been complicit in opposing every serious attempt to reign in the excesses of the adtech industry. Instead they have put forward frivolous proposals like the laughable and cynically named “Privacy for America” program that protects the industry’s interests but undermines serious attempts to protect consumer privacy.
Mr. Cohen’s remarks were ignorant and irresponsible. His assertion that people opposed to the dangerous practices of the online ad industry are “extremists” and want to “eliminate” the advertising industry are absurd. Sadly, this is not surprising coming from the IAB. The IAB has the disgraceful ceo it deserves.
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29 January 2023
This whole piece is worth reading, but particularly these two extracts:
The most compelling advertising objective for any brand that aspires to be highly successful is to become famous. The most compelling advertising objective for any brand that is already famous is to remain famous. There is nothing else in advertising’s bag of tricks that can reliably provide fame’s contribution to business success.
One of the current obsessions of the advertising industry is “precision one-to-one” targeting. If you agree that fame is advertising’s most powerful contribution, then it should be obvious that “precision one-to-one” targeting is antithetical to this.
Advertising was invented for the very reason that trying to convince people one at a time was highly inefficient. But today, we are determined to go backward. If you want to sell one vacuum cleaner, sure, go door-to-door. But if you want to sell a million, you better find some way to make your vacuum cleaner famous.
When Meta and adtech complain that privacy laws and tech pushes hurt small businesses, what they really mean are businesses that rely on paying them for their tracking ads. And when businesses rely on tracking ads they’re not building brand awareness, they may as well be selling door-to-door.
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12 November 2022
…philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.
The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.
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10 November 2022
I’ve been using Affinity software for a couple of years and they offer a genuinely competitive alternative to Adobe. This week, they’ve announced the 2.0 versions of their apps.
Unlike Adobe, Affinity’s software is purchased as a one-time fee, with free updates until the next major release. Affinity 1.0 has been around since at least 2015 as far as I can tell – one reasonably-priced paid upgrade every seven years seems like a pretty good deal to me.
The best endorsement I can give is that I have the Creative Cloud Suite, but default to using the Affinity equivalents (Photo = Photoshop, Design = Illustrator, Publisher = InDesign). They load faster and are generally much more stable.
This launch comes with an offer for 40% off and the introduction of a Universal Licence – £90 for all their apps on all platforms (including the limited time offer). This is a steal but don’t fret if you can’t take advantage of this now – Affinity run semi-regular sales with decent discounts.
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27 October 2022
Two things of note from this video:
- macOS can now generate background noise to help you focus (under System Settings > Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds)
- Continuity camera isn’t just for live calls, you can record with it, too
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21 October 2022
The new hotness in tech seems to be training AI on datasets without the owner/subject’s knowledge or consent and using that to produce features or products to sell. See Clearview’s scraping of faces for facial recognition tech, AI art generators scraping artists’ works and more (not unrelated: Cambridge Analytica and the whole surveillance ads market).
AI advocates say this content is public and therefore fair game – “artists use everything they’ve seen to inform their work”.
However an artist’s limited, personal and somewhat curated experiences eventually produce a unique style after years of honing their craft. Companies training AI on every image that’s ever been digitised – without a single copyright owner’s consent – with the aim of selling access to their dataset (or getting a $bn exit) is another prospect altogether. The difference in scale is key.
Another example of this is GitHub’s Copilot which is essentially an intelligent code autocomplete. The underlying dataset was trained on open source repositories without the owner’s permission.
Now a group of lawyers are investigating to see if there’s potential for a lawsuit. One to watch.
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11 October 2022
The concept of a “personal carbon footprint” was something that the oil company BP promoted in the mid-2000s. Indeed, BP launched one of the first personal carbon footprint calculators, arguably as part of a larger public relations effort to establish the company as the environmentally conscious oil company.
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11 October 2022
Though beef consumption is responsible for only 6 percent of total carbon emissions, it often seems to fill close to 100 percent of my Twitter feed. The meat melee was fed by a highly successful and influential 2014 documentary, Cowspiracy, which promoted the false notion that meat-eating is the primary contributor to human-caused climate change. Cowspiracy diverted–you might even say deflected–attention from the real conspiracy on the part of fossil fuel interests to confuse the public about the role of fossil fuel burning.
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11 October 2022
The dividers have successfully generated a veritable “food fight”—in fact, a literal one, getting people to argue about their dietary preferences, as well as their preferred means of transportation, how many children they have, and other matters of lifestyle and personal choice. “If nobody is without carbon sin, who gets to cast the first lump of coal?” I asked in a commentary for Time magazine. “Who is truly walking the climate walk? The carnivore who doesn’t fly? The vegan who travels to see family abroad?” The opportunities for finger-pointing seem endless.
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11 October 2022
Regenerative agriculture based on recycling farm waste and using composted materials from other sources, combined with land use practices that enhance soil carbon sequestration, could potentally bury somewhere in the range of 3.5 to 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Let us once again take the very optimistic upper limit of 11 billion tons per year.
Adding together these contributions gives us 22 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. That sounds like quite a bit, but we are currently generating the equivalent of roughly 55 billion tons per year of carbon dioxide through fossil fuel burning and other human activities. That means that even if we accepted estimates from the very upper limits of the uncertainty range, the combined effect of reforestation and agriculture and land use practices would at most only slow the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a factor of 44 percent. In other words, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would continue to rise, just at a rate that is roughly half as fast.
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24 August 2022
I subscribed to Fastmail’s newsletter and was surprised to see they use Mailchimp to send them. But it turns out they create temporary email aliases for each subscriber every time they send an email.
Each time we send a newsletter, we create new temporary aliases for everyone to ensure we respect any changes in your newsletter preferences and keep your personal addresses private from our external email marketing tool (Mailchimp).
The temporary address will then expire, meaning you’ll disappear without a trace on Mailchimp and never receive any mail sent to that alias again.
At the moment, newsletters are sent 2–10 times per year. Each time a new newsletter is sent, a new list of aliases will be imported, reflecting any new additions or subtractions to users on the list.
It’s impressive – and cool – to see privacy-conscious companies walking the walk.
Cooler still, they don’t even store generated aliases:
It’s actually not too much effort! We generate time-limited aliases by hashing together your real address + expiration time + some randomness. When we get the mail, we reverse that process to look up your account and deliver it.
(We don’t even store the generated aliases!)
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13 August 2022
This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.
In this prediction, I find optimism. If TikTok acts as the poison pill that finally cripples the digital dictators that for so long subjugated the web 2.0 revolution, we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.
Food for thought (and hope).
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22 July 2022
There’s just one little problem with personalisation: it doesn’t make any sense. We believe the case against personalisation is significantly stronger than the case for it.
Most personalisation efforts are powered by third-party data. Marketers infer who customers are based on their browsing behavior. So how good is that third-party data? It must be extremely good, if you’re claiming to understand buyers on a “personal level”.
Spoiler alert: it’s not. Most third-party data is, to put it politely, garbage.
In an academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School, researchers decided to test the accuracy of third-party marketing data. So, how accurate is gender targeting? It’s accurate 42.3% of the time. How accurate is age targeting? It’s accurate between 4% and 44% of the time. And those are the numbers for the leading global data brokers.
Many enterprise technology companies spend millions of dollars ‘hyper-targeting’ IT decision makers (ITDMs) using third-party data. But if we get gender wrong more often than 50% of the time, what percentage of ITDMs do you think are actually ITDMs, according to the research?
Do you want to guess? It’s 14.3%. And for ‘senior ITDMs’, that number drops to 7.5%.
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17 July 2022
A report by Reveal and The Markup found that “Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online…
No surprises there!
From the Washington Post:
The company (Google) received nearly 150,000 requests for user data from US law enforcement in the first half of 2021…and it handed over information on users in 78% of those cases. An estimated 26 states are expected to ban or heavily restrict abortion, and prosecutors will almost certainly go to tech companies, such as Google and Facebook…to seek the evidence they need to charge people who help provide the procedure.
Hoffman’s summary neatly wraps it up:
For years, those who couldn’t see beyond their own noses couldn’t understand how “I have nothing to hide” was so fucking stupid. In an environment in which marketers know everything about us and governments try to know everything about us, everyone has something to hide. We just don’t know what it is.
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2 July 2022
The notion of surveillance advertising being perpetrated by ad platforms via social interactions is a myth: there is no omniscient social media entity spying on its users and hoarding their interaction data to power ads targeting.
This piece argues that surveillance advertising is a myth because:
- Social media’s engagement algorithms (i.e. user likes a video) don’t interact with advertiser’s info (user buys product and that’s fed back to the social media platform)
- It’s advertisers that do the surveilling, not social media platforms
But sending data about a user’s interactions on third-party sites back to social media platforms for ads targeting is precisely the ‘surveillance’ part of ‘surveillance advertising’. Especially when you consider how that data is used for other advertisers – that a user hasn’t interacted with – through lookalike audiences etc.
The piece mention’s the W3C definition of tracking:
Tracking is the collection of data regarding a particular user’s activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred.
That definition of tracking sounds awfully like the data being sent to social media companies from third-parties. Tracking is another word for surveillance.
Surveillance. Advertising.
The piece also argues that the spheres of misinformation and on-platform engagement are unrelated to data fed back to social media platforms. But, as anyone who’s read Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck – a detailed account of Cambridge Analytica’s activities – this data has literally been used to anticipate behaviour at a population level and use that to manipulate elections and referendums.
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