Commonplace

Great tip from John Gruber, and something all iPhone users should know:

The first is hard-locking. When you hard-lock your iPhone or iPad, it enters a mode that requires the device passcode to unlock. With recent iPhones and iPads, you enter this mode the same way that you turn off the device: by pressing and holding the power button and either of the volume buttons for about two seconds.

[On iPhone 8 and later] you can also do the same thing by quickly pressing the side button alone five times.

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. A context is a set of resources that are controlled by the same party or jointly controlled by a set of parties.

Good to see this defined by the W3C.

Command + Shift + 5, go to options and select location. Game changer

Sheryl Sandberg announced this month that she’s resigning from Facebook—now called Meta—to focus on her philanthropy. Her work there is done.

During her 14 years at the company, she’s done so much damage to our society that we may never recover. The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good.

This may not be a pivot to data justive warrior, but this get-rich-working-at-horrendous-tech-co before using those funds for conscience-clearing philanthropy has more than a hint of Maria Farrell’s Prodigal Techbro about it.

A website is a file or bundle of files living on a server somewhere. A server is a computer that’s always connected to the internet, so that when someone types your URL in, the server will offer up your website. Usually you have to pay for a server. You also have to pay for a domain name, which is an understandable piece of language that points to an IP. An IP is a string of numbers that is an address to your server.

Links (rendered default blue and underlined—they’re the hypertext “HT” in HTML) are the oxygen of the web. Not all websites have links, but all links connect to other webpages, within the same site or elsewhere.

What a wonderful explanation.

Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web’s future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google.

(Emphasis my own)

I couldn’t agree more.

This whole article is a fanastic look at what a website is, what it can be and why it’s important for the web to be diverse.

The notion that if a company has built a business model on top of privacy-invasive surveillance advertising, they have a right to continue doing so, seems to have taken particular root in Germany.

I’ll go back to my analogy: it’s like pawn shops suing to keep the police from cracking down on a wave of burglaries.

Too right, and it’s not just that the surveillance advertising is unethical – the data has often been collected illegally.

Centuries of pre-internet advertising prove that tracking isn’t necessary for advertising to work…

Daring Fireball is a fantastic example of this.

…but no one is arguing that tracking isn’t effective.

Effective at driving huge profits perhaps. There is growing evidence that demonstrates tracking ads aren’t that effective at their core activity.

From Augustine Fou (emphasis my own):

A 2019 study showed that a single targeting parameter, gender, derived from anonymous website visitation patterns was only 42% accurate, worse than random. If you did no targeting at all, and just did “spray and pray” with your digital ads, you’d at least hit one of the genders 50% of the time. When two parameters were taken into account – age and gender – the accuracy dropped as low as 12%. That’s like 9 times out of 10, those targeting parameters were wrong. And advertisers paid extra to make their digital marketing worse, not better.

Then there’s Bob Hoffman’s infamous Programmatic Poop Funnel. That chart showed how only three cents out of every dollar spent on programmatic ads is seen by humans.

And we can’t forget Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis:

…the accuracy [of data profiles used for advertising] was often extremely poor. The most accurate sets still featured inaccuracies about 10% of consumers, with the worst having nearly 85% of the data about consumers wrong.

There are many more examples.

But I wonder how many clients would be happy to continue spending on surveillance ads given how inaccurate and expensive they are?

Studies have shown that these inferences are inaccurate, if not completely wrong. For example, a 2019 study showed that a single targeting parameter, gender, derived from anonymous website visitation patterns was only 42% accurate, worse than random. If you did no targeting at all, and just did “spray and pray” with your digital ads, you’d at least hit one of the genders 50% of the time. When two parameters were taken into account – age and gender – the accuracy dropped as low as 12%. That’s like 9 times out of 10, those targeting parameters were wrong. And advertisers paid extra to make their digital marketing worse, not better.

(Emphasis my own.)

That last sentence is the kicker. How long will adtech, or their customers, ignore the increasing numbers of reports like this?

For a couple of years, I’ve been using a fairly terrible playlist system of grouping songs by month. That doesn’t really work because I often don’t listen to enough music in a month to put together a playlist, so I skip months. Organising by season, however? That could really work.

I recently noticed a new ‘Inactive Tabs’ button in Firefox iOS. It’s a new featured where windows that haven’t been opened for two weeks get shifted to a new area. I went from over 100 tabs to about ten.

It turns out it’s an experimental feature, not available to everyone, but it certainly seems like a good one.

The offences occurred between May 2013 and September 2019, according to the court document, with the information ostensibly used for purposes including two-factor authentication. But Twitter would then use this data to allow advertisers to target specific groups of Twitter users, by matching the telephone numbers and email addresses to the advertisers’ own lists of telephone numbers and email addresses.

Aside from being generally horrible, this is terrible for user trust in security measures. It also demonstrates how single pieces of data can be used to de-anonymise users when compared to other datasets.

This is another great piece from Julia Angwin @ The Markup, shining the spotlight on the tactics of big tech.

This newsletter looks at the Facebook “Pixel”. It’s a seemingly innocuous tracking script to site owners (“we’re just improving our conversion rate!”) and simultaneously one of grossest widespread violations of privacy on the internet.

As Jason Kint has pointed out on many occasions, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority’s report into big tech showed that Facebook collect more data more users when then they’re not on Facebook than they do when users are on the site. That’s because of the Facebook Pixel.

Any site using a Facebook Pixel is sending your data to Facebook whether you like it or not.

Probably without your clear, informed permission. And almost certainly without a simple, easy way to withdraw permission – if you ever gave it to them, that is.

When you think about the scale of data fed back to Facebook, it’s pretty horrendous. I’m glad we live in a time where browsers like Firefox and Safari are working to protect internet users against this mass invasion of privacy.