A good overview of the state of UDID by Kim-Mai Cutler:
What Does A Post-UDID World Look Like For iPhone And iPad Developers? | TechCrunch.
A good overview of the state of UDID by Kim-Mai Cutler:
What Does A Post-UDID World Look Like For iPhone And iPad Developers? | TechCrunch.
This evokes the move TubeMogul made into advertising:
Flurry is a company that is most known for its huge analytics platform that’s integrated in more than 160K apps across iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web. Now, it’s using that data to launch a new ad platform it’s calling AppSpot.
Flurry describes AppSpot as a ‘data-powered’ advertising platform. Basically, its planning on using the data that it gathers across 500M devices running its analytics platform and using it to supercharge the ad targeting of its new ad platform. This is an incredibly smart move, one that other companies are going into as well.
Interesting commentary on how Custora would implement the tracking discussed in the Target article from last week:
The pregnancy prediction problem can be further broken apart as follows:
via How We Would Do It: Predicting Customer Pregnancy At Target | Custora Blog.
Isn’t this the reason why everyone got into a privacy fit about Amazon’s Kindle Fire browser?
“It’s unique to our product because of our cloud-based browsing system,” said Mahi de Silva, the firm’s evp of consumer mobile. ”We do this to accelerate the browsing experience for users, but it also gives us key insights.”
via Is the Browser the Secret to Mobile Ad Targeting? | Digiday.
This made me think back to the good old days when Google was not a big fan of cookies–
Google is caught using a known method to get around 3rd party cookie blocking on Safari:
To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings. While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form. So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.
The cookie that Google installed on the computer was temporary; it expired in 12 to 24 hours. But it could sometimes result in extensive tracking of Safari users. This is because of a technical quirk in Safari that allows companies to easily add more cookies to a user’s computer once the company has installed at least one cookie.
via Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings – WSJ.com.
Long read for the weekend:
In this excerpt from his new book, The Daily You, University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow takes you on a tour of the industry that’s trafficking in the data you generate every day on the Internet. You don’t have to be a privacy stickler to be worried.
I see numerous emerging trends related to the explosive growth of smartphones. One of these is “context”. Many people will have seen how location-enabled applications have been able to generate highly relevant and timely content. Suppose I permit Google Maps to know my location. Then when I enter coffee into the search bar, it should “push” me the most relevant coffee shop: in this case, the closest. As social networks such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter integrate further with other services, your friends and followers, the people you align yourself with, can provide content with improved depth. This context shows not just the closest coffee shop, but the one which my friends enjoy visiting the most.
via Business: Where angels will tread | The Economist.
Sounds similar to the vision for adware circa ten years ago.
Measuring the causal effects of online advertising (adfx) on user behavior is important to the health of the WWW publishing industry. In this paper, using three controlled experiments, we show that observational data frequently lead to incorrect estimates of adfx. The reason, which we label “activity bias,” comes from the surprising amount of time-based correlation between the myriad activities that users undertake online… In all three experiments, exposure to a campaign signals doing “more of everything” in given period of time, making it difficult to find a suitable “matched control” using prior behavior. In such cases, the “match” is fundamentally different from the exposed group, and we show how and why observational methods lead to a massive overestimate of adfx in such circumstances.
Verizon is making a significant change to its privacy policy for mobile users this week. By default, the company will now use a bunch of your info for “certain business and marketing reports” and for “making mobile ads you see more relevant.”
via Privacy alert: Verizon is now monitoring your mobile Web habits – Computerworld Blogs.
This could obviously be extended to not only ads but websites. Also, Facebook has the ability to track ad views at the user identifiable level. Dangerous (but valuable) stuff for advertisers. There’s a lot of value here for advertisers and that’s what makes this so scary as a consumer.
Enter Facebook. The social network is partnering with Nielsen to provide the demographic data on who sees ads placed around the Internet–even if those ads aren’t placed on Facebook itself–sort of like a real-time, always-on Nielsen family.
