A report released last week contends that Amazon uses voice data from its Echo devices to serve targeted ads on its own platforms and the web. The Verge reports: he report, produced by researchers affiliated with the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and Northeastern University, said the ways Amazon does this is inconsistent with its privacy policies. Titled, "Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem," the report concludes that Amazon and third parties (including advertising and tracking services) collect data from your interactions with Alexa through Echo smart speakers and share it with as many as 41 advertising partners. That data is then used to "infer user interests" and "serve targeted ads on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web)." It also concludes that this type of data is in hot demand, leading to "30X higher ad bids from advertisers."

Amazon confirmed to The Verge that it does use voice data from Alexa interactions to inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads. "Similar to what you'd experience if you made a purchase on Amazon.com or requested a song through Amazon Music, if you ask Alexa to order paper towels or to play a song on Amazon Music, the record of that purchase or song play may inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads." Amazon spokesperson Lauren Raemhild said in an email.

The company also confirmed there are targeted ads on its smart speakers. "Customers may receive interest-based ads when they use ad-supported premium content -- like music, radio or news streams," said Raemhild, pointing out that this is the same experience if they engaged with that content on other channels. She went on to say that Amazon does not share voice recordings with developers. "Developers get the information necessary to fulfill your requests within their skills, such as answers when you play a trivia skill, or the name of the song you want to play," she said. "We do not share our customers' personal information to third-party skills without the customer's consent." Amazon allows Alexa users to opt out of ad targeting as well (see sidebar). "Many of the conclusions in this research are based on inaccurate inferences or speculation by the authors, and do not accurately reflect how Alexa works," added Raemhild. "We are not in the business of selling our customers' personal information and we do not share Alexa requests with advertising networks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world. Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.

"The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms." [...] Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU's comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark. Lawmakers in the US keen to rein in Big Tech with their own regulations have already begun looking to the EU's rules for inspiration.

The final text of the DSA has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain [...]. Although the broad terms of the DSA have now been agreed upon by the member states of the EU, the legal language still needs to be finalized and the act officially voted into law. This last step is seen as a formality at this point, though. The rules will apply to all companies 15 months after the act is voted into law, or from January 1st, 2024, whichever is later. "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users," notes The Verge. "Users should also be offered a recommender system 'not based on profiling.' In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)."

The tech giants will also be prohibited from using "dark patterns" -- confusing or deceptive UIs designed to steer users into making certain choices. A detailed list of obligations contained in the DSA can be found in the article.

Sony is building a program to let advertisers buy ads in PlayStation games. From a report: It's doing testing with adtech partners to place in-game ads, similar to an initiative by rival Microsoft. The program is expected to launch before the end of the year. Sony is working on a plan to put ads inside PlayStation games, sources said, similar to a move by Microsoft to run ads in Xbox. Three people who are involved in the plans said Sony is doing testing with adtech partners to help game developers create in-game ads through a software developer program. The idea is to encourage developers to keep building free-to-play games, which have soared in the pandemic, by giving them a way to monetize them, they said. PlayStation's current ad inventory is limited to in-menu ads like game publishers promoting their own titles in the console's store, the sources said. PlayStation also serves ads on streaming video to people who stream via their consoles through apps like Hulu .

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Netflix said inflation, the war in Ukraine and fierce competition contributed to a loss of subscribers for the first time in more than a decade and predicted more contraction ahead, marking an abrupt shift in fortune for a streaming company that thrived during the pandemic. Netflix's 26% tumble after the bell on Tuesday erased about $40 billion of its stock market value. Since it warned in January of weak subscriber growth, the company has lost nearly half of its value. The lagging subscriber growth prompted Netflix for the first time to say it might offer lower-priced version of the service with advertising. [...] In addition to advertising-supported plans, the company is also looking to generate additional revenue from customers who share their account with friends or family outside their home.

"A new survey claims Windows 11 adoption is so low it's actually less popular than the 20-year-old Windows XP," reports PC Magazine: The survey comes from an IT management provider called Lansweeper. Through its own software products, the company scanned 10 million Windows devices this month to determine which OS they were using. The results found that only 1.44% of the devices had Windows 11 installed, which is lower than the 1.71% for Windows XP. In contrast, Windows 10 maintains a dominant share at 80.34%. Although Windows 11's adoption is low at 1.44%, the number actually went up almost three times from 0.52% back in January.

It's also important to note that other surveys have found much higher Windows 11 adoption numbers. Last month, the app advertising platform AdDuplex found Windows 11 usage was at 19.4%, although this represented a mere 0.1% growth from the previous month. Meanwhile, the Steam hardware survey from Valve estimates Windows 11 usage has reached 16.8%.

Microsoft wants to let advertisers place ads inside free-to-play Xbox games. According to Insider, the company "is currently identifying adtech companies who can create the in-game inventory and work with ad agencies to place the ads." From the report: This new program will boost Xbox's limited ad inventory by adding more games that brands can advertise in and by allowing more developers to sell ad space. Those sources said those ads would show up as, for instance, digitally rendered billboards in a car racing game. Insider was unable to learn if Xbox will also offer other types of in-game ad units, like avatar skins or video ads that play in gaming lobbies. Insider was also unable to determine if Microsoft has pitched the Xbox offering to advertisers yet. Insider's sources expect this capability to be live by the third quarter.

The two sources said the tech giant did not seem intent on taking a cut of ad revenue, and that it seemed more interested in building out the Xbox ad network. Ad revenue will be shared by the game developer and the adtech company that places the ad, those sources believe. One of the sources speculated Microsoft isn't currently interested in collecting a cut of ad revenue because it wants to provide more money-making opportunities to developers who make free-to-play games.

Microsoft started talks to build an Xbox in-game ad network around 2018 or 2019, but that process accelerated thanks to the 2020 release of the latest Xbox, and the boom in free-to-play titles, the two sources said. Microsoft is worried inserting ads into Xbox games could irritate people who don't expect to see ads when playing on consoles, so it's moving cautiously and intends to create a "private marketplace," where only select brands can insert ads into games in a way that doesn't disrupt the gameplay experience, the two sources said. They also said Microsoft is concerned about securing its customers' data, so other companies can't use it.

Video-sharing app TikTok's advertisement revenue is likely to triple in 2022 to more than $11 billion, exceeding the combined sales of its rivals Twitter and Snap, according to research firm Insider Intelligence. Reuters reports: TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is one of the world's most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users. "TikTok's user base has exploded in the past couple of years, and the amount of time users spend on the app is extraordinary," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at Insider Intelligence.

Twitter and Snapchat are expected to generate $5.58 billion and $4.86 billion, respectively, in advertising revenue for 2022, with the combined value still less than the $11 billion projected for TikTok. Nearly $6 billion, or more than half, of this year's ad revenue is expected to come from the United States, despite regulatory concerns over user data from U.S being passed on to China.

UPDATE: Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen have now responded to Elon Musk's suggestion to create a homeless shelter out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, "since no one shows up anyway."

And at some point over the weekend, Musk also suggested a new way that Twitter could use Dogecoin...

It all started when the newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — began tweeting new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets.

"And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Musk later offered suggestions about how to implement that subscription fee, according to the Associated Press. Musk suggested it "should be proportionate to affordability and in local currency."

And he added, "Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?" referring to Dogecoin cryptocurrency.

But moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea:

Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway.

Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.")

Sunday night Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, "a fellow billionaire, responded Sunday with a link to a report about an [8-story] homeless shelter attached to an Amazon office building, noting that a portion of Twitter's space could be converted, making it easier for employees who want to volunteer. Musk called the suggestion a "great idea...."

Homelessness is a particularly visible problem at Twitter's headquarters, located in a part of San Francisco where residents have grappled with urban decay and drug addiction.
Silicon valley entrepreneur/investor Marc Andreessen then posted his own three-word reply. Apparently in response to Bezos's suggestion that employees could volunteer more easily if if a portion of their building were a homeless shelter, Andreessen joked, "Every other desk?"

And five hours after Musk's homeless shelter poll, he'd moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea:

Delete the w in Twitter?

Ben Thompson, making a case for why Netflix should sell ads: Here Netflix's biggest advantage is the sheer size of its subscriber base: Netflix can, on an absolute basis, pay more than its streaming competitors for the content it wants, even as its per-subscriber cost basis is lower. This advantage is only accentuated the larger Netflix's subscriber base gets, and the more revenue it makes per subscriber; the user experience of getting to that unique content doesn't really matter. All of these factors make a compelling case for Netflix to start building an advertising business. First, an advertising-supported or subsidized tier would expand Netflix's subscriber base, which is not only good for the company's long-term growth prospects, but also competitive position when it comes to acquiring content. This also applies to the company's recent attempts to crack down on password sharing, and struggles in the developing world: an advertising-based tier is a much more accessible alternative.

Second, advertising would make it easier for Netflix to continue to raise prices: on one hand, it would provide an alternative for marginal customers who might otherwise churn, and on the other hand, it would create a new benefit for those willing to pay (i.e. no advertising for the highest tiers). Third, advertising is a natural fit for the jobs Netflix does. Sure, customers enjoy watching shows without ads -- and again, they can continue to pay for that -- but filler TV, which Netflix also specializes in, is just as easily filled with ads. Above all, though, is the fact that advertising is a great opportunity that aligns with Netflix's business: while the company once won with a differentiated user experience worth paying for, today Netflix demands scarce attention because of its investment in unique content. That attention can be sold, and should be, particularly as it increases Netflix's ability to invest in more unique content, and/or charge higher prices to its user base.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What's it like to spend $10,000 for Internet service and wait six months for Comcast to hook it up? Jonathan Rowny knows the answer. Rowny and his wife and child moved from Virginia to Washington state in May 2021. Rowny told Ars that before closing on the house in the city of Buckley, he checked Comcast's website to confirm that he could sign up for broadband. "I went ahead and placed my order and scheduled the install for the day after we moved in or whatever... I think it was about four days before closing [on the house] that Comcast canceled my order," he said. Rowny said that someone from Comcast called him with the message that "your house is not serviceable."

Comcast initially told Rowny that he'd have to pay over $19,000 for a line extension. After spending a couple of months investigating his options, Rowny hired a contractor to do part of the work and paid Comcast to do the rest, for a total of about $10,000. Construction took a bit longer than expected, and there was one final frustration after the line extension was completed: Comcast wouldn't send an installer to Rowny's house because the company's records incorrectly showed the work wouldn't be done until April. Rowny had to contact a senior vice president to get that issue sorted out and finally got service in mid-January.

We confirmed last week that Comcast's online ordering system was still giving false availability information on Rowny's street. At another house about 400 feet further down Rowny's street, the Xfinity.com address checker said that Internet service is available, and the website let us add an Internet plan to the cart for purchase. That was on Tuesday, and we notified Comcast of the likely error. Comcast has since corrected the address checker so that it now says the home is "out of footprint" and "Xfinity service is not available at this address." A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this address "doesn't have service and is not currently connected to our network, and we have never had a request for service construction to that address... that is an error and our local team is looking into why it is listed on the site." If someone had ordered service for this address before it was corrected, that person would have faced the same problem Rowny encountered in May 2021. We also asked Comcast if it is evaluating the rest of the area for similar mistakes and did not get an answer.

slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of internet usage, especially given this system's eye-rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly.

The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.

With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."

Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a new campaign today to push the Bitcoin network to slash its growing greenhouse gas emissions. The Verge reports: The goal of the campaign, dubbed "Change the code, not the climate," is to switch up the energy-hungry process of verifying transactions and mining new Bitcoins. [...] In order to validate transactions, Bitcoin miners rely on specialized hardware to solve complex puzzles. Their computers gobble up a lot of energy in the process, and the miners get new tokens in return. It's a process called "proof of work," in which the energy used is sort of the price paid to verify transactions. The process is deliberately energy-intensive as a safety measure. The baked-in inefficiency is meant to discourage bad actors from manipulating the data because it would cost a lot of energy to do so.

The new campaign aims to move Bitcoin away from that energy-hungry proof of work process. The most popular alternative is called proof of stake. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake use vastly less energy because there are no puzzles to solve. Instead of essentially paying with electricity to participate in the process, you have to offer up some of your own tokens. This is supposed to prove that you have a "stake" in keeping the ledger accurate. If you mess anything up, you lose tokens as a penalty. While proof of stake might make solve a lot of Bitcoin's pollution problems, experts have been skeptical that miners would be willing to make the change. Miners invest a lot in their hardware and would be hard-pressed to abandon it. And some fans of proof of work maintain that it's the most secure way to maintain the ledger. "We know Bitcoin stakeholders are incentivized not to change," the campaign acknowledges on its website. "Changing Bitcoin would render a whole lot of expensive infrastructure worthless, meaning Bitcoin stakeholders will need to walk away from sunk costs -- or find other creative solutions."

As the Guardian notes, the campaign is launching a huge digital advertising push via the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Marketwatch, Politico, Facebook and others. "Organizers are also taking legal action against proposed mining sites and using their large memberships to push bitcoin's biggest investors and influencers to call for a code change." Additionally, the campaign is urging people to tweet at cryptocurrency influencers to support the campaign.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Internet traffic in and out of Twitter on Monday was briefly funneled through Russia after a major ISP in that country misconfigured the Internet's routing table, network monitoring services said. The mishap lasted for about 45 minutes before RTCOMM, a leading ISP in Russia, stopped advertising its network as the official way for other ISPs to connect to the widely used Twitter IP addresses. Even before RTCOMM dropped the announcement, safeguards prevented most large ISPs from abiding by the routing directive. A visualization of what the event looked like is illustrated on this page from BGPStream.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at network analytics company Kentik, said that what little information is known about Monday's BGP event suggests that the event was the result of the Russian government attempting to block people inside the country from accessing Twitter. Likely by accident, one ISP made those changes apply to the Internet as a whole. "There are multiple ways to block traffic to Twitter," Madory explained in an email. "Russian telecoms are on their own to implement the government-directed blocks, and some elect to use BGP to drop traffic to certain IP ranges. Any network that accepted the hijacked route would send their traffic to this range of Twitter IP space into Russia -- where it likely was just dropped. It is also possible that they could do a man-in-the-middle and let the traffic continue on to its proper destination, but I don't think that is what happened in this case."

The Federal Trade Commission sued Intuit in federal court on Monday, claiming it has deceived customers for years by marketing its TurboTax software as free and then charging most users when they file their income taxes. From a report: Around 56 million people filed their taxes with TurboTax in 2021, according to an Inuit shareholder presentation in January. Those individuals filed 54 million W-2 and 40 million 1099 tax forms, the company said. The FTC sued Intuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asking for an immediate halt to its "bogus" advertising as taxpayers rush to meet the April 18 deadline to file their 2021 income taxes. The agency also issued a parallel administrative complaint on Monday. That proceeding will determine whether Intuit's conduct violated the FTC Act, the lawsuit said. Much of Intuit's advertising tells consumers they can file their income taxes for free online using TurboTax, but that's not true for most users, including independent contractors in the gig economy who get a 1099 tax form, the FTC said.

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.

Wikipedia points out that America's two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons).

It's now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports: The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums....

Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it's not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won't present much of a problem. AARP isn't saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There's no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging. As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of "house rules" that encourages users to "be courteous" and "cite your sources." Posts about politics aren't forbidden, but the rules say posts can't stray off-topic, and users can't "attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures." Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward.

"The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend.... " Suzanne Myklebust, OATS's director of communications, told Ars.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world's toughest rules to protect people's online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. [...] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple's in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission.

Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads -- based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook -- are immensely lucrative for both companies.

[...] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight -- just like health care, transportation and banking industries. "Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were 'too big to care,' Europe has put its foot down," said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. "We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide." On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks -- a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy -- and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is suing Grubhub for deceptive business practices, saying its food delivery app covertly inflates prices for diners who order through it. The suit demands an end to a laundry list of allegedly illegal practices as well as financial restitution and civil penalties. The newly filed lawsuit (PDF) argues that Grubhub's promises of "free" online orders -- and "unlimited free delivery" for Grubhub Plus -- are misleading. While customers can make pickup orders for free, the company charges delivery and service fees for standard orders and service fees for Grubhub Plus orders, displaying the service fee until recently as part of a single line with sales taxes. "Grubhub misled District residents and took advantage of local restaurants to boost its own profits, even as District consumers and small businesses struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic," said Racine in a statement. "Grubhub charged hidden fees and used bait-and-switch advertising tactics -- which are illegal."

The complaint says Grubhub orders often cost more than ordering the same item at a restaurant and argues that the company fails to reasonably disclose this to consumers. "Because Grubhub already charges consumers several different types of fees for its services ... consumers expect that the menu prices listed on Grubhub are the same prices offered at the restaurant or on the restaurant's website," it says. Grubhub has also listed many restaurants without their permission to expand its service, routing orders through its services and taking a commission. The complaint says it listed "over a thousand" restaurants in DC that had no connection with the company, asserting that the unapproved listings often contained menu errors and resulted in orders that would "take longer to fill, would be filled incorrectly, would be delivered cold, or would eventually be cancelled altogether."

Grubhub -- which also operates Seamless and several other food delivery apps -- has made more elaborate attempts to insert itself into restaurant transactions as well. The lawsuit notes its launch of unsanctioned microsites that appear to be official restaurant sites, as well as custom phone numbers that let it charge fees when customers call restaurants, even when the calls didn't result in orders. The company also offered a "Supper for Support" promotion that required restaurants to foot the bill for a special discount; it offered restaurants $250 in compensation after a backlash. "During the past year, we've sought to engage in a constructive dialogue with the DC attorney general's office to help them understand our business and to see if there were any areas for improvement," said Katie Norris, director of corporate communications, in a statement. "We are disappointed they have moved forward with this lawsuit because our practices have always complied with DC law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued. We will aggressively defend our business in court and look forward to continuing to serve DC restaurants and diners."

According to The Verge, Grubhub "says the app no longer lists restaurants that haven't agreed to work with it, and it's retired its microsites and the Supper for Support program." It will also make it more clear to users that prices might be lower when ordering directly from the restaurant, "and it will specify in marketing that only pickup orders are free," adds The Verge. The company maintains that it "has not misrepresented its fees," however.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Last year, the Graph Foundation had to rethink how it develops and distributes its Open Native Graph Database (ONgDB) after it settled a trademark and copyright claim by database biz Neo4j. The Graph Foundation agreed [PDF] it would no longer claim specific versions of ONgDB, its Neo4j Enterprise Edition fork, are a "100 percent free and open source version" of Neo4J EE. And last month, two other companies challenged by Neo4j -- PureThink and iGov -- were also required by a court ruling to make similar concessions.

ONgDB is forked from Neo4j EE, which in May 2018 dropped the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) and adopted a new license that incorporates the AGPLv3 alongside additional limitations spelled out in the Commons Clause license. This new Neo4j EE license forbade non-paying users of the software from reselling the code or offering some support services, and thus is not open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative. The Graph Foundation, PureThink, and iGov offered ONgDB as a "free and open source" version of Neo4j in the hope of winning customers who preferred an open-source license. That made it more challenging for Neo4j to compete.

So in 2018 and 2019 Neo4j and its Swedish subsidiary pursued legal claims against the respective firms and their principals for trademark and copyright infringement, among other things. The Graph Foundation settled [PDF] in February 2021 as the company explained in a blog post. The organization discontinued support for ONgDB versions 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. And it released ONgDB 1.0 in their place as a fork of AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j EE version 3.4.0.rc02. Last May, the judge hearing the claims against PureThink, and iGov granted Neo4j's motion for partial summary judgment [PDF] and forbade the defendants from infringing on the company's Neo4j trademark and from advertising ONgDB "as a free and open source drop-in replacement of Neo4j Enterprise Edition" The defendants appealed, and in February the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision that the company's "statements regarding ONgDB as 'free and open source' versions of Neo4j EE are false." "Stop saying Open Source when it's not," said the Open Source Initiative in a blog post. "The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we've always known: that it's false advertising to claim that software is 'open source' when it's not licensed under an open source license."

Walgreens and other retailers replaced some fridge and freezer doors with iPad-like screens, reports CNN. "And some shoppers absolutely hate it." The screens, which were developed by the startup Cooler Screens, use a system of motion sensors and cameras to display what's inside the doors — as well as product information, prices, deals and, most appealing to brands, paid advertisements. The tech provides stores with an additional revenue stream and a way to modernize the shopping experience. But for customers who just want to peek into the freezer and grab their ice cream, Walgreens risks angering them by solving a problem that shoppers didn't know existed. The company wants to engage more people with advertising, but the reaction, so far, is annoyance and confusion.

"Why would Walgreens do this?" one befuddled shopper who encountered the screens posted on TikTok. "Who on God's green earth thought this was a good idea?"

"The digital cooler screens at Walgreens made me watch an ad before it allowed me to know which door held the frozen pizzas," said someone on Twitter....

Walgreens began testing the screens in 2018 and has since expanded the pilot to a couple thousand locations nationwide. Several other major retailers are launching their own tests with Cooler Screens, including Kroger, CVS, GetGo convenience stores and Chevron gas stations. "I hope that we will one day be able to expand across all parts of the store," said Cooler Screens co-founder and CEO Arsen Avakian in an interview with CNN Business. Currently the startup has about 10,000 screens in stores, which are viewed by approximately 90 million consumers monthly, according to the company....

Politifact last month debunked a viral Facebook video that claimed "Walgreens refrigerators are scanning shoppers' hands and foreheads for 'the mark of the beast.'"

Avakian insists the tech is "identity-blind" and protects consumers' privacy. The freezers have front-facing sensors used to anonymously track shoppers interacting with the platform, while internally facing cameras track product inventory...

The items on display don't always match up with what's inside because products are out of stock.....

"This is the future of retail and shopping," Avakian said.
CNN notes that major corporations are backing the company Cooler Screens, which "has raised more than $100 million from backers including Microsoft and Verizon." But long-time Slashdot reader davidwr points out it's been done before. "Some gas stations have had video ads at the pump for years now. I boycott those stations on principle."

And Slashdot reader quonset wonders if we're one step closer to Futurama's vision of a world where advertisers enter our dreams.