This past week I’ve come across a plethora of fascinating articles on technology’s impact on our society – from surveillance capitalism, to potentially unethical practices by Facebook that took advantage of children… as well as some positive news making a case for non-targeted online advertising. Here is a selection of the most intersting articles I found:
Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right?
Wired
Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics, and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g. how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous data set with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.
There's a simple reason your new smart TV was so affordable: It's collecting and selling your data
Business Insider
If you want a 65-inch 4K smart TV with HDR capability, one can be purchased for below $500 — a price that may seem surprisingly low for such a massive piece of technology, nonetheless one that’s likely to live in your home for years before you upgrade.
But that low price comes with a caveat most people probably don’t realize: Some manufacturers collect data about users and sell that data to third parties. The data can include the types of shows you watch, which ads you watch, and your approximate location.
After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges in Europe — and kept growing ad revenue
DigiDay
When the General Data Protection Regulation arrived last year, The New York Times didn’t take any chances.
The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, svp for global advertising at New York Times International.
Federal judge unseals trove of internal Facebook documents about how it made money off children
Reveal
A trove of hidden documents detailing how Facebook made money off children will be made public, a federal judge ruled late Monday in response to requests from Reveal.
A glimpse into the soon-to-be-released records shows Facebook’s own employees worried they were bamboozling children who racked up hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of dollars in game charges. And the company failed to provide an effective way for unsuspecting parents to dispute the massive charges, according to internal Facebook records.
