onfocus

"During testing, with every response — such as clicking a button to indicate feeling depressed “more than half the days” over the last two weeks — a pixel sent Facebook the text of the answer button, the specific URL the user was visiting when clicking the button, and the user's hashed name, email address, phone number."

The targeted advertising industry has set up some ridiculous incentives for people to behave horribly toward other people.

Excellent parody of Scott McCloud’s 2008 comic about the wonders of Google Chrome. This is about the danger Chrome poses to our privacy. (And I’m obligated to say modern Firefox is a good alternative.)

I like getting shipping confirmations and updates, but all I need is a glance at the subject line and forget about it. The solution: tell Gmail to archive or delete certain emails after a specified number of days. Surprisingly enough, Gmail does not have this as a native feature. Users can set filters to automatically delete emails from certain senders or with keyword pattern matches, sure, but that’s an instant filter and those emails never see the light of day.

This is a great solution to Gmail's lack of retention policy features that I've been using for a while now. I set up a label for regular notification emails and this script moves them to the trash after 7 days or so. I was tired of Google trying to sell me more space. So I did a big purge and now emails are flowing to the Trash regularly.

"'For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,' said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. 'The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.'"

Alternate title: how Google profits from online hate.

"...Google and Facebook’s contract stipulated that they would “cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action” and “promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement.” Antitrust is mentioned at least 20 times in the contract."

When you know what you're doing is wrong, but the money is too good: Jedi Blue.

"CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they’re blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie."

more like post-apocalyptchas, right?

"Over 70% of the videos flagged by respondents came through YouTube's suggestion algorithm — an effect that's impossible to study because the algorithm is a closely-guarded secret at Google. That means YouTube users aren't primarily finding misinformation through search, but through YouTube feeding users those videos."

Hosting disinformation is bad enough, but actively recruiting people—at scale—is awful.

"Google has been pushing sites to use AMP for years and continues to recommend it as “the majority of the AMP pages achieve great page experiences”. But for websites that are optimized for speed, their AMP pages are often slower than the regular pages."

Very happy to see this.

iOS users must now give explicit permission for apps to track their behavior and sell their personal data, such as age, location, spending habits and health information, to advertisers. While many apps have allowed people to manage or opt-out of this for years, it's typically buried deep in user settings and wordy privacy policies.

Nice.

"But the staggering rise in their gains contrasts with the economic devastation of millions of Americans, amid soaring unemployment and evictions, drawing attention to issues of inequality and distribution of wealth. In fact, the $360 billion increase in top billionaire wealth approaches the $410 billion the U.S. government is spending on the latest round of $1,400 stimulus checks, passed with the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package this week."

huh, it's almost like they should pay more taxes to help out the struggling country their businesses operate in.

"’What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition,’ Wu wrote. ‘Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose.’"

This is good. [via Slashdot]