Yelp doesn’t rely on surveillance-based advertising, but they’d like to change that. They have launched a program to target ads at Yelp visitors on non-Yelp platforms based on their Yelp activities. Yelp will serve the ads, so there’s not enough data sharing to break most privacy rules. Consumers may not agree: this recent Jebbit study found 53% of people object to personalized emails based on data they haven’t knowingly shared.
The Washington Post and 16 media partners report Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus military-grade spyware was used to hack smartphones of select journalists, rights activists and business executives. The story, which NSO Group disputes, says these were included on a list of 50,000+ numbers concentrated in countries that surveil private citizens.
One billion dollars is pocket change at Facebook, which just pledged that amount to content creators in an eye-catching headline. But the reality is less impressive: the money is spread across two years and among several convoluted Facebook and Instagram programs. TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube already have similar programs involving hundreds of millions of dollars, so if Facebook hopes to buy its way to dominance, they’ll have to try harder.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.