The first large-scale, crowdsourced study that monitors how Meta tracks people across the internet By: Surya Mattu, Angie Waller, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, and Micha Gorelick Introduction Have you ever shopped for a product online only to see the item appear ad nauseam in your Facebook or Instagram feeds? This is often the result of the Meta...
Tag: Facebook
Irish regulator orders Meta to suspend data transfers to US
Meta, the Facebook owner, is under threat from Ireland's data regulator. They will order Meta to stop data transfers to the United States. This comes in the wake of a privacy case that has already seen threats from the social media giant to withdraw its websites from Europe. Helen Dixon, the Irish data protection commissioner,...
What does GDPR mean in practise?
Many businesses thought that by adding Cookie consent banners to their web pages and opt-in forms for email newsletter subscriptions they have satisfied the GDPR requirements. As it turns out, this is not the case. There are rulings by the Datenschutzbehörde in Austria, CNIL in France and a court in Munich that show how far...
Cookies: I looked at 50 well-known websites and most are gathering our data illegally
Alphabet and Meta and were both heavily fined for using cookies illegally at the tail end of 2021 by the French data protection authority.
Virtual influencers are here, but should Meta really be setting the ethical ground rules?
Earlier this month, Meta announced it is working on a set of ethical guidelines for “virtual influencers” – animated, typically computer-generated, characters designed to attract attention on social media.
Super apps – The platform for the post-app era
The world’s largest social media companies could evolve into super apps over the next few years. They will be able to facilitate a greater number of online activities. Although they were initially created to keep friends and family in touch or entertain, social media networks like Facebook, Snap, TikTok and others will be increasingly important...
Apple’s app tracking popup reportedly costs social media platforms nearly $10 billion
A report by the Financial Times showed that Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter lost approximately $9.85 billion in revenue due to Apple’s privacy changes. Apple last year announced the App Tracking transparency (ATT) policy, which requires that apps ask permission to track users. In April this year, the policy was finally implemented. Apps can no longer...
So Meta it hurts? Putting Facebook’s Metaverse in perspective
No article on the metaverse would be complete without a mention of the 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term. Stephenson’s novel is a prophetic work, written before the rise of the modern social web and coming to many of the same conclusions as Silicon Valley’s current generation of techno-utopians. Snow...
Facebook’s Outage shows how Businesses depend on it
Tomiwa Ibukunle is a 21-year old entrepreneur from Lagos, Nigeria. She started her clothing and accessories company two months ago. Her WhatsApp account is used to promote her products and receive orders from customers. She typically receives 20 orders per day. When WhatsApp experienced an outage globally for eight hours on October 5th, her orders...
Inital numbers show that 88% of Users Leave App Tracking Disabled in iOS 14.5
Numbers by the data analytics firm Flurry show that just 12% of iPhone users wordlwide actively opt into app tracking. In the U.S. the numbers are even lower, with just 4% opting in. Until iOS 14.5, apps were able to use Apple’s Identifier for Advertiser (IDFA) for tracking users across webapges and apps. This helped...
