An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The day after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter (PDF) to Google warning it to be on alert for "exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities," and calling on the company to audit its advertising business's compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia's largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Google allowed RuTarget, a Russian company that helps brands and agencies buy digital ads, to access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to research from digital ad analysis firm Adalytics. Adalytics identified close to 700 examples of RuTarget receiving user data from Google after the company was added to a U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned entities on Feb. 24. The data sharing between Google and RuTarget stopped four months later on June 23, the day ProPublica contacted Google about the activity.

RuTarget, which also operates under the name Segmento, is owned by Sberbank, a Russian state bank that the Treasury described as "uniquely important" to the country's economy when it hit the lender with initial sanctions. RuTarget was later listed in an April 6 Treasury announcement that imposed full blocking sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian entities and people. The sanctions mean U.S. individuals and entities are not supposed to conduct business with RuTarget or Sberbank. Of particular concern, the analysis showed that Google shared data with RuTarget about users browsing websites based in Ukraine. This means Google may have turned over such critical information as unique mobile phone IDs, IP addresses, location information and details about users' interests and online activity, data that U.S. senators and experts say could be used by Russian military and intelligence services to track people or zero in on locations of interest. Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told ProPublica that the company blocked RuTarget from using its ad products in March, and that RuTarget has not purchased ads directly via Google since then. "He acknowledged the Russian company was still receiving user and ad buying data from Google before being alerted by ProPublica and Adalytics," adds the report.

"Aciman said this action includes not only preventing RuTarget from further accessing user data, but from purchasing ads through third parties in Russia that may not be sanctioned. He declined to say whether RuTarget had purchased ads via Google systems using such third parties, and he did not comment on whether data about Ukrainians had been shared with RuTarget."

The company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club has sued conceptual artist Ryder Ripps for selling duplicates of its Bored Ape non-fungible tokens or NFTs. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in a California court this weekend, accuses Ripps of a "calculated, intentional, and willful" scheme to damage BAYC while promoting his own copycat work. Ripps and Yuga Labs have been at odds for months, in part because of Ripps' RR/BAYC NFT series. The series used BAYC images but connected them with a different crypto token and sold them for the equivalent of around $200 apiece, a bargain compared to the real thing, which currently sell for around $100,000 on the low end.

"This is no mere monkey business. It is a deliberate effort to harm Yuga Labs at the expense of consumers by sowing confusion about whether these RR/BAYC NFTs are in some way sponsored, affiliated, or connected to Yuga Labs' official Bored Ape Yacht Club," says the lawsuit. The suit accuses Ripps of false advertising and trademark infringement among other offenses. It asks for financial damages and a court order demanding he cease infringing on BAYC's work, including a ban on using "confusingly similar" domain names like apemarket.com.

T-Mobile has just officially launched its new ad platform, known as T-Mobile Advertising Solutions. That innocuous name hides a rather sketchy business model -- it aggregates your mobile application usage and sells it to advertisers. Android Police reports: The specifics of the program will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the ebb and flow of browser tracking. T-Mobile uses network-level tools to track the apps that people use on their phones, and it then anonymizes and aggregates that data to lump you into various "personas," or "cohorts" as other platforms would call it. For example, if you regularly use Expensify and airline apps on your phone, T-Mobile could identify you as a business traveler for advertising purposes. This program has been in testing for the past year as "T-Mobile Marketing Solutions," according to The Verge, but it is now live with its new name.

There is some good news (but less of it for Android fans). T-Mobile does not currently collect app data on iOS users, fearing it could run afoul of Apple's privacy rules. But we Android users are fair game, apparently. However, you can opt-out of T-Mobile's program using its official "Magenta Marketing Platform Choices" app. Alternatively, the Digital Advertising Alliance offers an app that lets you opt-out of numerous trackers, including T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, which is listed under its old name of T-Mobile Marketing Solutions.

VentureBeat reports: Video game legend Bernie Stolar, former president of Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75, friends said.
Bernie Stolar was the first executive VP of Sony Computer Entertainment America, according to their article, and helped line up the games for the launch of the first PlayStation, eventually signing franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Oddworld Inhabitants, Spyro The Dragon and Battle Arena Toshinden.

VentureBeat remembers how Stolar then became president/COO of Sega of America, helping lead the development and launch of the Sega Dreamcast (while killing development of their home video console Saturn). Stolar acquired Visual Concepts for Sega of America, which ultimately led to the creation of 2K Sports. Joining Mattel in 1999, he helped the company sell a line of videogames.

But then Stolar became an adviser/director at Adscape Media, and later sold that company to Google for $23 million. The lead writer for VentureBeat's GameBeat remembers what happened next — and what he'd learned after interviewing Stolar in 2015: "There was no interest in games at Google at the time," Stolar said. "I went to the CEO, who was Eric Schmidt, and said, 'Why don't we put advertising in all these games and give them away for free online?' He said, 'We're not in the game business." I said, 'We're not going into the game business. We're not developing games. We're taking games from publishers and streaming those through our online network.' He wouldn't do it. That's when I knew I should leave the company...."

Toward the end of our interview in 2015, Stolar said, "I've been doing this since 1980. I love this business. I love it because I get to work with people who are young and passionate. I'm one of the old gray-haired guys in the industry, but it's wonderful to work with all this young talent."

Stolar joked he could be the grandfather for the CEOs he was advising. I asked Stolar how long he would work.

"Put it this way. I've spoken to two individuals about this, Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch," he said. "They're both in their 80s. They're both multi-billionaires. They certainly don't have to work, right? And they've both said to me, 'If you retire, you die.' I believe that. My father, when he sold his liquor store and stopped working, passed away three months later. I'm not going to stop."

From the MacRumors blog earlier this week: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, has initiated proceedings against Apple to investigate whether its tracking rules and anti-tracking technology are anti-competitive and self-serving, according to a press release. The proceeding announced will review under competition law Apple's tracking rules and specifically its App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATT) in order to ascertain whether they are self-preferencing Apple or being an impediment to third-party apps...

Introduced in April 2021 with the release of iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5, Apple's App Tracking Transparency Framework requires that all apps on âOEiPhoneâOE and âOEiPadâOE ask for the user's consent before tracking their activity across other apps. Apps that wish to track a user based on their device's unique advertising identifier can only do so if the user allows it when prompted.

Apple said the feature was designed to protect users and not to advantage the company... Earlier this year it commissioned a study into the impact of ATT that was conducted by Columbia Business School's Marketing Division. The study concluded that Apple was unlikely to have seen a significant financial benefit since the privacy feature launched, and that claims to the contrary were speculative and lacked supporting evidence.
The technology/Apple blog Daring Fireball offers its own hot take: In Germany, big publishing companies like Axel Springer are pushing back against Google's stated plans to remove third-party cookie support from Chrome. The notion that if a company has built a business model on top of privacy-invasive surveillance advertising, they have a right to continue doing so, seems to have taken particular root in Germany. I'll go back to my analogy: it's like pawn shops suing to keep the police from cracking down on a wave of burglaries....

The Bundeskartellamt perspective here completely disregards the idea that surveillance advertising is inherently unethical and Apple has studiously avoided it for that reason, despite the fact that it has proven to be wildly profitable for large platforms. Apple could have made an enormous amount of money selling privacy-invasive ads on iOS, but opted not to.

Google has failed to convince a California federal judge to dismiss a privacy lawsuit that alleges the Alphabet Inc unit sells or gives personal information to third parties through its digital advertising system, without informing users. From a report: In a Monday opinion, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland said Google account holders have sufficiently alleged most of their claims in the lawsuit over the company's "real-time bidding" process. A Google spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that privacy and transparency are "core" to its ad services. "We never sell people's personal information, we have strict policies specifically prohibiting personalized ads based on sensitive categories of information, and sensitive user data like health, race, or religion is not shared with our partners," the spokesperson said.

Mozilla: Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows and Mac. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site. Whether it's applying for a student loan, seeking treatment or advice through a health site, or browsing an online dating app, massive amounts of your personal information is online -- and this data is leaking all over the web.

The hyper-specific-to-you ads you so often see online are made possible by cookies that are used to track your behavior across sites and build an extremely sophisticated profile of who you are. Recent stories (including an excellent Last Week Tonight episode) have shown how robust, yet under-the-radar, the data selling economy is and how easy it is for anyone to buy your data, combine it with more data about you and use it for a variety of purposes, even beyond advertising. It's an alarming reality -- the possibility that your every move online is being watched, tracked and shared -- and one that's antithetical to the open web we at Mozilla have strived to build. That's why we developed Total Cookie Protection to help keep you safe online.

Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate "cookie jar" for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don't belong to them and find out what the other websites' cookies know about you -- giving you freedom from invasive ads and reducing the amount of information companies gather about you. This approach strikes the balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies -- in particular the ability to track you -- and allowing those cookies to fulfill their less invasive use cases (e.g. to provide accurate analytics). With Total Cookie Protection in Firefox, people can enjoy better privacy and have the great browsing experience they've come to expect.

In 2019 SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced it would build it's own search engine, remembers Search Engine Land. After investing $60 million of its own money, this month that search engine has finally launched with the name of "Yep", and Ahrefs "is positioning it as a Googe competitor.

"However, we've seen plenty of Google competitors and Google "killers" come and go over the past two decades. So for now, let's just call it a Google alternative... Yep will not collect personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender) by default. Your Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.

What Yep will rely on is aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions, the company said. "In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way," said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko.... What Yep will use is a searcher's:

- Entered keywords.
- Language preference received from the browser.
- Approximate geographical area at the origin of the search at the scale of a region or a city (deduced from the IP address)....

AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion webpages every 24 hours, which makes it the second most active crawler on the web, behind only Google, Ahrefs said. For 12 years, AhrefsBot has been crawling the web. They had just been using the AhrefsBot data to power its link database and SEO insights. The Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Daily, the company adds 30 million webpages and drops 20 million.

Ahrefs said its Singapore data center is powered by around 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data (webpages, links between them, and the search index). Each server uses at least 2x 100GB connections... Before the end of the year, Ahrefs plans to open a U.S.-based data center.
"It's a unique proposition," reports TechCrunch, "running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.

"As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I'll only ever use by accident." Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it's giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant:

"Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers," the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. "Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary."

It's an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:

"Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work...."

Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that's what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
Search Engine Land points out that DuckDuckGo, which launched in 2008, "gets as many searches per year (~15.7 billion) as Google gets in about two or three days. Even Microsoft Bing — which is owned by Microsoft, the third-largest company on the planet by market cap — has failed to make a significant dent in Google's search market share since 2009."

But they also quote Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko as saying in 2019, "If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search."

Committee leaders in both the House and Senate are poised to introduce an online privacy bill, with key lawmakers releasing a bipartisan draft Friday. From a report: The U.S. has lagged behind the E.U. and China in establishing national privacy rules for online platforms, but this bipartisan effort shows signs of life even as the looming midterms mark the unofficial end of legislating. House Energy & Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ), ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on Friday unveiled a discussion draft of their American Data Privacy and Protection Act. The bill would require companies to minimize the data they collect, ban targeted advertising to children under 17 years old and allow people to sue companies for violations under certain circumstances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [B]uying a Ford electric vehicle might be a lot less painful in the future, if Ford CEO Jim Farley gets his way. On Wednesday, Farley said that he wants the company's EVs to be sold online-only, with no dealer markups or other price negotiations, according to the Detroit Free Press. "We've got to go to non-negotiated price. We've got to go to 100 percent online. There's no inventory (at dealerships), it goes directly to the customer. And 100 percent remote pickup and delivery," Farley said while speaking at a conference in New York.

One of Tesla's most popular innovations was to eschew traditional dealerships and sell its products directly to customers. But traditional manufacturers like Ford are usually prohibited from selling their products directly to customers, a legacy of fears over vertical integration written into state laws during the early 20th century. As such, Ford's franchised dealers will almost certainly still have a role to play. "Then we have this opportunity to use our physical presence to outperform [competitors]. I think our dealers can do it. But the standards are going to be brutal. They're going to be very different than they are today," he said.

The move away from dealerships carrying extensive inventories of cars should save Ford money; the company says that its current distribution model adds around $2,000 in extra costs per car compared to Tesla. A third of that cost is tied up in inventory, and another third is spent on advertising.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The federal privacy commissioner's investigation into the Tim Hortons mobile app found that the app unnecessarily collected extensive amounts of data without obtaining adequate consent from users. The commissioner's report, which was published Wednesday morning, states that Tim Hortons collected granular location data for the purpose of targeted advertising and the promotion of its products but that the company never used the data for those purposes. "The consequences associated with the App's collection of that data, the vast majority of which was collected when the App was not in use, represented a loss of Users' privacy that was not proportional to the potential benefits Tim Hortons may have hoped to gain from improved targeted promotion of its coffee and associated products," the report read.

The joint investigation was launched about two years ago by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in conjunction with similar authorities in British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta. It came after reporting from the Financial Post found that the Tim Hortons app tracked users' geolocation while users were not using the app. According to a presentation to investors shared in May, the restaurant chain's app has four million active users.

Tim Hortons was using a third-party service provider, Radar, to collect geolocation data of users. In August 2020, Tim Hortons stopped collecting location data. However, the investigation found that there was a lack of contractual protections for users' personal information while being processed by Radar. The report describes the language in the contractual clauses to be "vague and permissive," which could have allowed Radar to use the personal information collected in aggregated or de-identified form for its own business. [...] The report states that Tim Hortons also agreed to delete all granular location data and to have third-party service providers do so as well, as per recommendations from the privacy authorities. The company also agreed to establish a privacy management program for its app and all future apps to ensure they are compliant with federal and provincial privacy legislation. Given these remedies, the report found that while the Tim Hortons app was not compliant with privacy laws, the company has since taken measures to resolve the issues. "We've strengthened our internal team that's dedicated to enhancing best practices when it comes to privacy and we're continuing to focus on ensuring that guests can make informed decisions about their data when using our app," a statement from Tim Hortons released on Wednesday said.

Meta Platforms's Sheryl Sandberg, who became one of the most recognized figures in global business after helping Facebook transform from a startup into a multibillion-dollar advertising powerhouse, is stepping down as chief operating officer. From a report: Sandberg, 52, will remain on the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a post on the social network Wednesday. Javier Olivan, who has led the company's growth efforts for years, will take Sandberg's place as COO when she formally steps down in the fall.

On Monday night, some Spotify users went to download their favorite podcasts and were met with an error. By Tuesday morning, the issue was resolved. What was the source of the massive disruption impacting some of the platform's biggest producers? An expired security certificate. From a report: The SSL security certificate is what keeps a website secure by enabling encryption, giving it the "s" in HTTPS. For Megaphone, the podcast advertising and publishing platform Spotify acquired in 2020, the certificate expired Monday evening. Shortly thereafter, publishers and listeners for Megaphone-hosted podcasts experienced service disruptions. "Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate," a Spotify spokesperson told NPR. "During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored." The entire outage lasted for about nine hours, with Megaphone publishing real-time updates of the issue. Some podcast publishers took to Twitter to express their frustration business implications of the outage, according to Verge.

Vodafone is piloting a new advertising ID system called TrustPid, which will work as a persistent user tracker at the mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) level. Vodafone explains that TrustPiD will be generated through randomness, and its subscribers will have the option to manage their consent over accepting the tracking via the company's Privacy Portal. BleepingComputer reports: The new system is in test phase in Germany and is intended to be impossible to bypass from within the web browser settings or through cookie blocking or IP address masking. The mobile carrier plans to assign a fixed ID to each customer and associate all user activity with it. The ID will be based on a number of parameters, so that the system will be able to maintain persistence. Then, the mobile ISP creates a personal profile based on that ID and helps advertisers serve targeted ads to each customer without disclosing any identification details.

According to Vodafone, the problem that arises for its internet subscribers is that the "free" parts of the internet are threatened by stricter cookie blocking and privacy-boosting schemes. These new models threaten the targeted advertising industry, and according to Vodafone, the danger of this is losing content and platforms currently supported by ads. "Consumers appreciate the idea of a 'free' Internet, but this comes with a trade-off: publishers need a sustainable revenue model, meaning that it becomes essential to add subscription paywalls or rely on advertising to maintain free access to high-quality content," reads the explanation on the TrustPiD website, managed by Vodafone Sales and Services Limited.

Singapore has begun a project to investigate potential uses of asset tokenization as the city state looks to establish itself as a hub for decentralized finance after several key crypto players left. From a report: "Project Guardian," a collaboration between the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the finance industry, will test the feasibility of applications in asset tokenization and decentralized finance (DeFi) while working to manage risks to financial stability and integrity, according to a statement from Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat on Tuesday.

The project aims to develop and pilot use cases in areas including open, interoperable networks; trust anchors; and institutional-grade DeFi protocols. The first pilot in the project will explore potential DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets. The pilot, led by DBS Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Marketnode, involves the creation of a permissioned liquidity pool comprising tokenized bonds and deposits. The MAS was relatively early among regulators to look at uses of blockchain technology, and Singapore set up a licensing regime a few years ago. However, applicants have been frustrated by the slowness of approvals, and a crypto advertising ban caught the industry off guard.

Ford's fuel-economy figures for the 2013-2014 C-Max hybrids "were not based in reality" says Iowa's attorney general.

And now the Ford Motor Company "will pay $19.2 million to a consortium of 40 states and Washington,D.C.," writes Consumer Reports (which also covers additional false advertising about the payload capacity of its Super Duty pickup trucks). In these two cases, Ford exaggerated numbers for an advantage in competitive segments. And it was caught....

Ford ran a series of ads that claimed the C-Max provided better fuel economy than the Toyota Prius. The 2013 C-Max was originally rated at 47 mpg in city and highway driving, and 47 mpg overall. The claim was that it delivered 47 mpg in every situation. Back on Dec. 6, 2012, Consumer Reports wrote... "After running both vehicles through our real-world tests, we have gotten very good results. But they are far below Ford's ambitious triple-47 figures." We got 37 mpg overall in our tests. That's close to what owners reported on the Environmental Protection Agency's fueleconomy.gov, at 39 mpg.... In our tests, the Toyota Prius at the time got 44 mpg overall, far more than the C-Max.
Iowa's attorney general notes that "In 2013, Ford admitted that its initial fuel economy rating for the C-Max hybrid was likely overstated. The carmaker announced at the time that it would make a 'goodwill payment' of $550 to consumers who purchased a 2013 C-Max hybrid and $325 to those who leased the vehicle, according to Edmunds."

Consumer Reports adds: It then made hardware updates for new models, including a higher final gear ratio, lower-viscosity motor oil, and aerodynamic improvements, including a rear spoiler, new hood seals, and air deflectors in front of the tires, and a higher speed threshold for the electric drive. The new mpg figures were 39 mpg combined for 2014 through 2016 (41 city, 36 highway)...

This case underscores why Consumer Reports goes to great lengths to test the fuel economy of every nonelectric car we purchase. It provides realistic, objective, independent information for car shoppers and helps keep the auto industry honest.
Consumer Reports also quotes Ford's statement on their false advertising. "We are pleased that the matter is closed without any judicial finding of improper conduct."

"We worked with the states to resolve their concerns."

An international investigation uncovered some disturbing results, reports the Washington Post. "Millions of children had their online behaviors and personal information tracked by the apps and websites they used for school during the pandemic..." The educational tools were recommended by school districts and offered interactive math and reading lessons to children as young as prekindergarten. But many of them also collected students' information and shared it with marketers and data brokers, who could then build data profiles used to target the children with ads that follow them around the Web.

Those findings come from the most comprehensive study to date on the technology that children and parents relied on for nearly two years as basic education shifted from schools to homes. Researchers with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch analyzed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries, and they shared their findings with The Washington Post and 12 other news organizations around the world.... What the researchers found was alarming: nearly 90 percent of the educational tools were designed to send the information they collected to ad-technology companies, which could use it to estimate students' interests and predict what they might want to buy.

Researchers found that the tools sent information to nearly 200 ad-tech companies, but that few of the programs disclosed to parents how the companies would use it. Some apps hinted at the monitoring in technical terms in their privacy policies, the researchers said, while many others made no mention at all. The websites, the researchers said, shared users' data with online ad giants including Facebook and Google. They also requested access to students' cameras, contacts or locations, even when it seemed unnecessary to their schoolwork. Some recorded students' keystrokes, even before they hit "submit."

The "dizzying scale" of the tracking, the researchers said, showed how the financial incentives of the data economy had exposed even the youngest Internet users to "inescapable" privacy risks — even as the companies benefited from a major revenue stream.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You might have seen the headlines over the past year: Chinese sellers are leaving Amazon. Since early 2021, the e-commerce giant says it has banned 3,000 Chinese accounts for using paid reviewers to artificially inflate ratings, a practice known as "brushing." The narrative sounds pretty simple, right? Dishonest Chinese sellers gaming the system! Of course they should be punished. Amazon has said that it issued the bans after repeated warnings over manipulated reviews, and that no seller has been targeted by nationality. Meanwhile, in Chinese media, the sellers have a different account. They describe paying ever-rising costs, while struggling with restrictions on how they sell on the platform. When they have brushed up their ratings, sellers told Chinese tech media Pingwest, it's because Amazon's stringent requirements have pushed them to, in order to survive. (A Chinese e-commerce industry association estimates at least 50,000 banned.) Either way, the relationship has somewhat soured.

In 2012, when Amazon entered China and aggressively recruited sellers onto its third-party Marketplace platform, merchants treated founder Jeff Bezos with reverence. Many of them considered him a role model, and resonated with Amazon's lofty principles of "putting the customer first" and "creating long-term value." Amazon Marketplace was appealing to Chinese sellers in two important ways: there was almost no barrier to entry, and they could mark up their products as much as they liked. Products that cost 5-6 yuan on Taobao could be sold for $20 (about 140 yuan) on Amazon -- a markup of 20-30 times the original price! Not percent, but times. Lured by the crazy-high profit margin, the number of Chinese sellers on Amazon climbed sharply.

Within a few years, Marketplace growth took off. Between 2014 and 2015, sales from Amazon's Chinese merchants tripled. By 2017, one-third of all international sellers on Amazon were from China, and Marketplace's sales volume had surpassed that of the main Amazon platform. Here comes the catch. Despite all the PR around Amazon Web Services, we know that Marketplace is Amazon's real moneymaker. Recall that Amazon charges for commissions, advertising, logistics and warehousing. And warehousing costs alone have soared since Chinese sellers came on board, continuing to grow with a nice 11% bump just this February. Costs to advertise -- something crucial for smaller sellers -- surged 50% during the pandemic. But the thing is, it's hard to sell if you're not part of Prime, wherever you're based, and that probably means signing up for all the above charges. And this is the case inside just the Amazon universe.

Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million fine after federal law enforcement officials accused the social media company of illegally selling advertisements based on an improper use of personal data over six years. NPR reports: In court documents made public on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice say Twitter violated a 2011 agreement with regulators in which the company vowed to not use information gathered for security purposes, like users' phone numbers and email addresses, to help advertisers target people with ads. Federal investigators say Twitter broke that promise.

"As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads," said FTC Chair Lina Khan. Twitter requires users to provide a telephone number and email address to authenticate accounts. That information also helps people reset their passwords and unlock their accounts when the company blocks logging in due to suspicious activity. But until at least September 2019, Twitter was also using that information to boost its advertising business by allowing advertisers access to users' phone numbers and email addresses. That ran afoul of the agreement the company had with regulators. More than 140 million Twitter users provided this kind of personal information based on "Twitter's deceptive statements," according to federal prosecutors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The ordeal of three people, who edited major movies down to 10 minutes and then uploaded those summaries to YouTube, is not over yet. After being arrested and found guilty in a criminal court last year, they now face action in the civil courts. A total of 13 companies including Toei, Kadokawa, Nikkatsu, and Fuji, say they are entitled to at least $3.9 million in copyright damages. [...] Clear indications of how seriously the anti-piracy groups and media companies are taking this action were on display after the lawsuit was filed last week. A press conference was held in Tokyo with a representative of CODA and three attorneys present to answer questions on the case.

Those present, including CODA director Takero Goto, highlighted that the three defendants committed criminal acts when they uploaded the movie edits and then profited from advertising revenue. The civil action aims to underline those convictions with a strong message that rightsholders will not allow people to free-ride on creators' content without facing significant financial consequences. The overall message is one of deterrence coupled with the reaffirmation of copyright law, Goto said.