Month: March 2021

Google Announces It Will Phase Out Tracking Based on Third-Party Data in Its Ad Products ⇥ blog.google

David Temkin of Google:

It’s difficult to conceive of the internet we know today — with information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people — without advertising as its economic foundation. But as our industry has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies. This has led to an erosion of trust: In fact, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center. […]

I do like how Temkin admits that the company whose website this announcement is being made on has played a major role in degrading the web for around four out of five people surveyed — without actually saying that. But go on:

That’s why last year Chrome announced its intent to remove support for third-party cookies, and why we’ve been working with the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers. Even so, we continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.

One reason Google is doing this is because it operates at such a vast scale that it can continue to abuse user privacy with its own services with little adjustment. This affects third-party tracking and data, so it disadvantages smaller ad tech firms that are not part of the web advertising duopoly.

Nevertheless, and in combination with antitrust action, this is a good step for an internet economy that depends less on surveillance. When the New York Times announced last May that it was going to phase out third-party user data for its online advertising, there was a similar chorus of misguided jeering. Less cross-site tracking is better for the web and better for privacy — full stop. But better is not enough.

A Look at Shady Browser Extension Takeovers ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A company that rents out access to more than 10 million Web browsers so that clients can hide their true Internet addresses has built its network by paying browser extension makers to quietly include its code in their creations. This story examines the lopsided economics of extension development, and why installing an extension can be such a risky proposition.

The risks increase as we work more in web browsers and through web apps. Browser extensions can be nasty software. Yet, despite knowing all of this and covering it for years, I still think of them less seriously than standalone applications. I don’t know about you but, in my mind, browser extensions are just lightweight little scripts that give me a download button on YouTube or block egregious ads — even though I know that is not the case.

Dustin Curtis Missed an Apple Card Payment, and Then His Apple ID Was Locked ⇥ dcurt.is

Dustin Curtis:

The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I’d never heard of similar cases involving Apple’s services, and I wouldn’t expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later.

[…]

As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card.

This whole story is troublesome for several reasons — the poor customer service response, the confusing email Curtis received, the dead-end address Curtis was supposed to reply to — but primarily so because it validates some of the concerns people had about Apple entering the finance business. There are incentives for users to put their Apple purchases on their Apple Card. But the hidden risk of creating a closed loop of payments, products, and services is that being locked out of any of them will impact all of them. I do not blame anyone for switching their Apple-related payments to an Apple Card, but it seems like it comes with more caveats than Apple is letting on.

This financialization push is also incentivizing Apple to become an enforcer for a company that sucks.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

First, to hold your digital life hostage until you pay off a credit card bill is grotesquely disproportionate. Second, Apple is acting as a debt collector on behalf of another company, and telling you that until you sort out your payments with them, you’re going to be shut out of your digital life. Yes, it’s called the “Apple Card”, but as the statement above explicitly details, you have to settle your debts with Goldman Sachs. Because that’s who offered you the credit. Not Apple.

This is true. What is not true is how Hansson frames this problem: “Apple basically bricked his computer as a debt-collection tactic”. Curtis’ computer was not “bricked”. The problems Curtis experienced, the grim world of credit cards, and the conglomeration of companies are all serious enough concerns that we do not need to make things up. I hope this never happens to anyone else regardless of the reason, but that really only solves the first issue. Apple is still in the credit card business with Goldman Sachs, which means it is still profiting off interest payments from indebted individuals.

Update: Apple provided a statement to Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac:

We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience we may have caused for this customer. The issue in question involved a restriction on the customer’s Apple ID that disabled App Store and iTunes purchases and subscription services, excluding iCloud. Apple provided an instant credit for the purchase of a new MacBook Pro, and as part of that agreement, the customer was to return their current unit to us. No matter what payment method was used, the ability to transact on the associated Apple ID was disabled because Apple could not collect funds. This is entirely unrelated to Apple Card.

So this is entirely related to the autopay problem Curtis had and the trade-in program not going according to plan. That is good news for Apple Card users.

All Vaccines for COVID-19 Are More Effective Than Those for the Flu ⇥ vox.com

Dylan Scott, Vox:

But that good news has been dampened somewhat because the media has focused on another number: efficacy, or how effective the vaccines are in preventing any illness at all, however mild it is. Viewed through that prism, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (with a 66 percent efficacy rate) looks substantially worse than Pfizer/BioNTech’s or Moderna’s (both 95 percent efficacious).

But I’ll let you in on a secret: Even the 66 percent efficacy rate is an impressive result. You need only look at seasonal flu vaccines for proof.

Zeynep Tufekci, the Atlantic:

What went wrong? The same thing that’s going wrong right now with the reporting on whether vaccines will protect recipients against the new viral variants. Some outlets emphasize the worst or misinterpret the research. Some public-health officials are wary of encouraging the relaxation of any precautions. Some prominent experts on social media — even those with seemingly solid credentials — tend to respond to everything with alarm and sirens. So the message that got heard was that vaccines will not prevent transmission, or that they won’t work against new variants, or that we don’t know if they will. What the public needs to hear, though, is that based on existing data, we expect them to work fairly well — but we’ll learn more about precisely how effective they’ll be over time, and that tweaks may make them even better.

A year into the pandemic, we’re still repeating the same mistakes.

We lack existing domestic production capacity for these vaccines in Canada, so we’re having to import our entire supply from Europe — at least until manufacturing facilities are completed. That means we have had hiccups in our rollout compared to the United States, where around two million doses are being administered every day now. We have vaccinated at about 20% of the rate of the U.S. so far.

But it sounds like many hiccups have been sorted out, and we’ll be fully vaccinated by the “end of the summer”. I cannot wait to see live music again.

Email Pushes the Buttons of Our Engrained Need for Connection ⇥ newyorker.com

Cal Newport, the New Yorker:

Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.

[…]

The flip side of an evolutionary obsession with social interaction is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s thwarted. Much in the same way that our attraction to food is coupled with the gnawing sensation of hunger in its absence, our instinct to connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these interactions. This matters in the office, because an unfortunate side effect of overwhelming e-mail communication is that it constantly exposes you to exactly this form of social distress. A frenetic approach to professional collaboration generates messages faster than you can keep up — you finish one response only to find that three more have arrived in the interim, and, while you are at home at night, or over the weekend, or when you are on vacation, you cannot escape the awareness that the missives in your in-box are piling up ever thicker in your absence.

It is awfully charming that the New Yorker continues to insist upon hyphenating “email” and “inbox”, as though these are new words heretofore unwritten and unpublished. Bless ’em.

I have found wild success in subverting my evolutionary bias for connection by simply turning notification sounds off. I keep many banners and badges on, but making them inaudible removes, for me, the urgency of each new thing I am supposed to deal with. But that is just the notifications; email itself is, according to Newport’s book extract, just as problematic.

I thought I had solved that by being atrocious at email. I archive liberally. I do not reply quickly or, often, ever. I can only hit inbox zero by deleting everything sight-unseen. The result of this is that there are several people awaiting my response to messages that are actually quite urgent.

Just look what this article has done: it has given me a reason to be stressed about email again.