phalse phace writes: After days of advanced talks to sell Quibi's content library to Roku, the companies have finally reached a deal. According to Deadline, Roku will acquire most of Quibi's content for less than $100 million.

"The acquisition covers most of the Quibi library, but some daily news shows are not part of the package," reports Deadline. "A key draw for Roku is the talent, a roster including Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Liam Hemsworth, Anna Kendrick, Nicole Richie, Chrissy Teigen and Lena Waithe. The lineup includes titles like Most Dangerous Game, Dummy and Murder House Flip. The programming will be available for free starting later this year. Shows will have advertising, as they did on the $5-a-month Quibi service, and they will be housed on the Roku Channel." Earlier today, Roku says it sold more smart TVs in the U.S. in 2020 than competitors like Samsung, LG and Vizio, becoming the biggest smart TV platform in North America.

Google is the U.K.'s first big post-Brexit antitrust target as regulators opened a probe into the company's planned changes to curb publishers' collection of advertising data. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said it's investigating Google's so-called privacy sandbox changes that could "undermine the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google's market power." The probe adds to Google's legal headaches around the world. The Mountain View, California-based company faces lawsuits from the U.S. Department of Justice and multiple states over allegedly anticompetitive practices. The U.K. probe focuses on Google's decision last year to phase out third-party cookies that help advertisers monitor customers' browsing habits and pinpoint the effectiveness of different advertising. Google's Chrome is the dominant web browser and the changes will be followed by rival products based on Google technology, such as Microsoft's Edge.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Georgians head to the polls to vote on their two U.S. Senators -- and effectively, partisan control of Congress -- on Tuesday, voters face an online landscape far different from what they saw in the weeks surrounding November's general election. In the fall, Facebook -- by far the most popular social network -- clamped down on sponsored posts about politics in order to ensure that misinformation would not spread the way that it had during the 2016 presidential election. But a few weeks before the Georgia race, Facebook turned off this safeguard in Georgia. The Markup decided to take a look behind the curtain to see if we could determine the impact on Georgia voters' news feeds. We recruited a panel of 58 Facebook users in the state and paid them to allow us to monitor their feeds, starting in late November, using custom software we built for our Citizen Browser project. The Citizen Browser project is a data-driven initiative to examine what content social media companies choose to amplify to their users.

While Facebook's controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists' feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users' feeds. The Markup defined election-related content as anything containing mentions of Trump or Biden, the names of the four major-party senate candidates, or the terms "senate," "vote," "election," or "ballot." We looked at the URLs attached to those election-related posts and tabulated the most common domains. For the first half of the month, the most commonly appearing election-related content came primarily from news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But after Dec. 16, just over one third of the most commonly appearing domains were partisan campaign sites buying ads, including WrongForGeorgia.com, an attack site targeting the Democratic candidates; and DeserveBetter.org, an attack site targeting the incumbent Republican senators. We discarded any domains that only appeared on a single panelist's feed.

Uber apparently squandered an estimated $100 million on third-party digital advertising campaigns. Input Mag reports: Former Sleeping Giants alum and co-founder of Check My Ads, Nandini Jammi, caught most of us up on the whole situation yesterday in a lengthy Twitter thread detailing just how Uber, the poster child of startup capitalism's unethical robber baron mentality, managed to recently waste a mind-boggling $100 million in pointless digital advertising campaigns through a host of blatantly shady ad networks. One such instance involved launching "'battery saver' style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone." Upon typing "Uber" into Google Play, the service "auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves."

It's a comprehensive rundown worth reading in its entirety, but to make a long story short: after getting publicly roasted for continually advertising on Breitbart -- Stephen Miller's racist, chauvinistic fever dream billing itself as a "news" outlet -- Uber's former Head of Acquisition, Kevin Frisch, realized the company could trim roughly 3/4 of its entire online advertising budget and see next to no change in consumer engagement. No, seriously. Over $100 million that could have been reallocated towards such "costly" investments like sick leave, overtime, health insurance, or any number of the other bare minimum workforce benefits Uber routinely denies its gig employees.

Microsoft is planning a "sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows" that is designed to signal to users of the operating system that "Windows is BACK." From a report: That's according to a job listing posted by Microsoft recently, advertising for a software engineering role in the Windows Core User Experiences team: "On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers." Microsoft quietly removed references to this "sweeping visual rejuvenation" this morning, after several Windows enthusiasts spotted the job listing over the weekend.

This weekend Forbes ran a thought-provoking article by "a digital marketer of 25 years" who now helps marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud: When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs. When big brands stopped spending on digital ads, nothing happened. Even further back in time, in 2012, eBay turned off their paid search ad spending, and saw NO CHANGE in sales coming from those sources...

Big brands turned off millions of dollars of digital ad spending, and saw no change in business outcomes. Small businesses tuned their digital marketing and reduced the number of ad impressions, clicks, and traffic to their sites, but saw business activity go up, instead of down. Much of the problem with digital advertising today stems from marketers' obsession with big numbers. But big numbers of ads and clicks do not translate into more business activity and sales. They are just large numbers in dashboards and spreadsheets. Marketers could be spending far fewer dollars and getting the same levels of business outcomes; or spending the dollars more smartly in digital and getting even more business outcomes than they are now.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In India, parents are being aggressively sold the idea that their children must start coding at 4 or 5 or be future failures, prompting Neelesh Misra [a writer, audio storyteller, and founder of a media and organic products company] to ask Do Children Really Need to Learn to Code? [Alternate URL here] In a New York Times Opinion piece that's sparked 1,000+ comments, Misra writes that "Aggressive campaigns pushing Indian parents and schools to embrace coding might help meet corporate targets, but they are creating a fear that a generation of children will lose out if their parents don't sign them up for these coding programs. Parents struggle to resist these shrewdly framed campaigns."
From the writer/storyteller/founder's piece: WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families... Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent's deepest fear: Will my child be left behind...?

Relentless advertising campaigns are telling Indian parents that coding is critical because making children code will develop their cognitive skills. Storytelling does all that too. And singing songs. And asking questions or being offered choices or visiting interesting places...

I realize that our world is about to change unrecognizably. Robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality shall soon be concepts and a way of living that will be second nature to our children. The future should excite us, not make our children feel afraid and ill equipped. The future should — and I am sure will — have a place for dreamers and doers, and not just those hunched forever over a computer.

An anonymous reader shares an analysis: See, Google Maps is not just an app on your phone. It's also a suite of developer tools that power countless other applications that are used by millions of people every day. And that part of the business is known as the Google Maps Platform (but most of the time I hear it referred to as the Google Maps API). In 2018, Google inexplicably decided to self-sabotage their enterprise maps business by raising their prices ~1,400% overnight. The only time in my life that I've ever felt envious of commission-based sales people was in the wake of that announcement — I would have really liked to work at Mapbox as an order-taker that following quarter. Still, today, you need an MBA with a specialization in Mind Games to understand the Google Maps Platform pricing scheme, and it helps to have a joint law degree to navigate their terms of service. In fact, the ToS are so Draconian, they're the subject of investigations by the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. My favorite tidbit from their recent report, Competition in Digital Markets quotes an anonymous Google Maps Platform customer:

Several developers stated that Google Maps introduced greater licensing restrictions as it gained a stronger market position. One noted that Google's control over what now serves as a key mapping technology has allowed Google to call all the shots. "We license Google Maps and it's essentially a contract of adhesion. It's full of restrictions and we aren't able to negotiate any changes," the developer said.

These are the actions of an organization that is annoyed they ever let people become their customers. And for what? A few hundred million in fees, maybe? That's likely nothing compared to the billions in advertising revenue from consumers searching for the best hamburger in town. So why not jack up the prices, lock down the data, and let 'em churn, baby, churn? The trouble is, Google isn't the only game in town anymore. If they keep alienating their customers and pursuing a proprietary data strategy at all costs, they're going to continue to lose ground to competition while spending more than ever just to tread water.

Eric Bangeman, writing for ArsTechnica: Despite over 82 million cases and over 1.75 million deaths due to COVID-19, many people are bound and determined to carry on with normal life. For some, that includes attending Saturday night ragers, just like they did in the Before Times. Reports of yet another secret party being broken up by law enforcement have become distressingly common. Getting guests for these secret parties is at least slightly more difficult now that Apple has pulled Vybe Together -- an app with a tagline that invited users to "get their party on" -- from the App Store. The Verge pointed out that the app had largely been flying under the radar until a tweet from Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times brought some unwelcome, but much-needed scrutiny to the app. One of Lorenz's tweets highlighted Vybe Together's TikTok account, which had posted videos of unmasked people partying indoors while advertising New Years Eve parties. According to Business Insider, TikTok has since removed Vybe Together's account for violating community guidelines.

Spyware maker NSO Group used real phone location data on thousands of unsuspecting people when it demonstrated its new COVID-19 contact-tracing system to governments and journalists, researchers have concluded. From a report: NSO, a private intelligence company best known for developing and selling governments access to its Pegasus spyware, went on the charm offensive earlier this year to pitch its contact-tracing system, dubbed Fleming, aimed at helping governments track the spread of COVID-19. Fleming is designed to allow governments to feed location data from cell phone companies to visualize and track the spread of the virus. NSO gave several news outlets each a demo of Fleming, which NSO says helps governments make public health decisions "without compromising individual privacy." But in May, a security researcher told TechCrunch that he found an exposed database storing thousands of location data points used by NSO to demonstrate how Fleming works -- the same demo seen by reporters weeks earlier. TechCrunch reported the apparent security lapse to NSO, which quickly secured the database, but said that the location data was "not based on real and genuine data." NSO's claim that the location data wasn't real differed from reports in Israeli media, which said NSO had used phone location data obtained from advertising platforms, known as data brokers, to "train" the system. Academic and privacy expert Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, who was also given a demo of Fleming, said NSO told her that the data was obtained from data brokers, which sell access to vast troves of aggregate location data collected from the apps installed on millions of phones.

An anonymous reader shares a feature report: At the end of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best-known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin Shkreli and the lawsuit-laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma. The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a Gallup Poll of the public's view of various business sectors, pharma was ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising and public relations, and lawyers. Who'd have guessed that a year later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world?

From cruise lines to meatpackers, business will have plenty to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but this part of it worked. The Covid-19 vaccines developed by the drug industry, in partnership with governments, will almost certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions more around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring an end to a year that has -- sing it together one last time as the ball drops over an empty Times Square -- really sucked. In a time where almost everything else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went (mostly) right.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent. The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time they were shown and that data behind a targeting criterion was "all crap." Facebook says the material is presented out of context.

They emerged from a suit currently seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach "highly compensated and educated investors" but "had limited resources to spend on advertising." But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village's ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. The complaint features Facebook documents indicating that the company knew its advertising capabilities were overhyped and underperformed. A "February 2016 internal memorandum" sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads, "[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41% -- that means that more than half the time we're showing ads to someone other than the advertisers' intended audience. And it is even worse internationally. We don't feel we're meeting advertisers' interest accuracy expectations today." The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed "employees on Facebook's ad team" discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016.

"Interest" and "behavior" are two key facets of the data dossiers Facebook compiles on us for advertisers; according to the company, the former includes things you like, "from organic food to action movies," while the latter consists of "behaviors such as prior purchases and device usage." The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which "[p]rivately, Facebook managers described important targeting data as 'crap' and admitted accuracy was 'abysmal.'" Facebook has said in its court filings that these quotes are presented out of context.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October. What's less known is that Oracle Corp. spent years working behind the scenes to convince regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington, more than 30 states, the European Union, Australia and at least three other countries to rein in Google's huge search-and-advertising business. Those efforts are paying off.

Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle's "black box" presentation showing how Google tracks users' personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle's top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the company's antitrust campaign against Google. Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users' location details -- even when the phones aren't in use -- and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign. "I couldn't be happier," said Glueck about the barrage of lawsuits. "As far as I can tell, there are more states suing Google than there are states." Oracle has fallen behind the tech giants in the marketplace, yet is notching one legal and regulatory win after another against them, Google especially. In response, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda denounced Oracle's "cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign," saying "while Oracle describes itself as the biggest data broker on the planet, we're focused on keeping consumers' information safe and secure."

Small advertisers that rely on Facebook to spread marketing messages are up in arms over the social network's automated ad systems, complaining that inflexible account blocking tools and a lack of customer assistance are hurting business. From a report: One digital marketer, Chris Raines, was setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook last week when his account abruptly stopped working. Raines uses his account to manage ads for clients' Facebook Pages. Without it, he couldn't do his job. The lockout was a nuisance, but then Raines noticed something more concerning: A $3,000-per-day ad campaign that he'd set up for a client before his account was locked continued to run even though he could no longer manage it. Raines was spending his client's money without any way to control how.

Raines tried to confirm his identity using Facebook's automated systems, but received an error message. Eventually, he called the advertiser and asked if they would make his wife an administrator to the company-owned Facebook Page. Using her account, he was finally able to log in and manage the Facebook ads, which includes adjusting details like who sees the ad and how much to spend. "The actual injury, especially for advertisers and marketers, is immense," said Raines, who runs a digital media company called Bullhorn Media. "Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went away."

Facebook and Google agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week. From a report: The suit, as filed, cites internal company documents that were heavily redacted. The Wall Street Journal reviewed part of a recent draft version of the suit without redactions, which elaborated on findings and allegations in the court documents. Ten Republican attorneys general, led by Texas, are alleging that the two companies cut a deal in September 2018 in which Facebook agreed not to compete with Google's online advertising tools in return for special treatment when it used them. Google used language from "Star Wars" as a code name for the deal, according to the lawsuit, which redacted the actual name. The draft version of the suit says it was known as "Jedi Blue." The lawsuit itself said Google and Facebook were aware that their agreement could trigger antitrust investigations and discussed how to deal with them, in a passage that is followed by significant redactions. The draft version spells out some of the contract's provisions, which state that the companies will "cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action" and "promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement." In the companies' contract, "the word [REDACTED] is mentioned no fewer than 20 times," the lawsuit says. The unredacted draft fills in the word: Antitrust.

T-Mobile has been asked to stop advertising its 5G network as more reliable than the competition by the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), which investigated T-Mobile's claims made primarily in an ad featuring celebrity scientist Bill Nye after complaints from Verizon earlier this year. From a report: But the NARB also says T-Mobile shouldn't have to mention the speed of its network when broadly discussing coverage superiority in future ads. T-Mobile has said it will comply with the recommendation. But it cast the recommendations as a partial win in a statement saying it "appreciates that the panel agreed that T-Mobile can continue to advertise its superior 5G coverage without qualification." T-Mobile's compliance is notable because telecom giants don't have to follow the recommendations offered by the NARB, which, as a self-regulatory body under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization, has no governmental regulatory power. For instance, AT&T flatly ignored a request it stop using its misleading "5G E" logo to reference a superior form of 4G.

The MacRumors site writes: Facebook's recent criticism directed at Apple over an upcoming tracking-related privacy measure is "laughable," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world.

Facebook has claimed that Apple's new opt-in tracking policy will hurt small businesses who benefit from personalized advertising, but the EFF believes that Facebook's campaign against Apple is really about "what Facebook stands to lose if its users learn more about exactly what it and other data brokers are up to behind the scenes," noting that Facebook has "built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything you do...." According to the EFF, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach app developers, and instead goes to third-party data brokers like Facebook, Google, and lesser-known firms.

"Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn't be further from the truth," the EFF said. "Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users' privacy and control."
"This is really about who benefits from the normalization of surveillance-powered advertising..." argues the EFF. And they ultimately come down in support of Apple's new privacy changes.

"Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong."

A bipartisan coalition of states sued Alphabet's Google Thursday alleging broad antitrust violations in the online search market, marking the third U.S. case against the search giant in two months. From a report: The lawsuit, led by Colorado, Iowa and other states, marks the latest escalation of the antitrust battle against Google. It comes a day after 10 Republican state attorneys general led by Texas sued the company for anticompetitive practices, and follows an October complaint by the Justice Department. "Combined with the other recent lawsuits filed against Google, never before have so many states and the federal government come together to challenge a company with such power," Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said a statement. "Google has more data on consumers, and more variety of information, than perhaps any entity in history." The lawsuit, filed by 38 attorneys general, accuses Google of illegally monopolizing internet search and search advertising through a series of anticompetitive contracts and conduct, hurting consumers and advertisers in the process.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Wednesday that he will soon file a multistate antitrust lawsuit against Google and its advertising business, alleging that the company has stifled competition and enjoys "monopolistic power." From a report: In a tweet, Paxton said the lawsuit will be filed on Wednesday. "This goliath of a company is using its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition and harm you, the consumer," Paxton said in a video accompanying the tweet. The text of the complaint was not immediately available. But a court record shows that nine other states are participating in the suit, including Kentucky, South Dakota, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Utah. The lawsuit marks the second antitrust suit by government officials to hit Google in the US this year. The Justice Department took the search giant to court over similar allegations in October. Eleven states joined the suit at the time. It also follows a lawsuit by more than 40 attorneys general against Facebook alleging it has abused a monopoly in social media.

Facebook attacked Apple in a series of full-page newspaper ads Wednesday, claiming the iPhone maker's anticipated mobile software changes around data gathering and targeted advertising are bad for small businesses. From a report: The ads, slated to run in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, carry the headline "We're standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere." They home in on upcoming changes to Apple's iOS 14 operating system that will curb the ability of companies like Facebook to gather data about mobile users and ply them with advertising. Facebook previously told investors that Apple's changes, scheduled to go live early next year, will lead to significant headwinds because most of its advertisers are small businesses. Apple has pushed back, accusing Facebook in November of showing a "disregard for user privacy." "While limiting how personalized ads can be used does impact larger companies like us, these changes will be devastating to small businesses," Facebook claims. The social giant, citing its own data, says ads that disregard personalized targeting generate 60% fewer sales than ads that do target consumers. The newspaper ads are the latest in what has become a vicious and public battle between two of the world's most valuable companies.