After acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion last week, many users were left wondering if Google would have access to their health information, such as the number of steps they take each day, their breathing patterns, sleep quality or menstrual cycles. Fitbit has since addressed those concerns in a blog post, claiming user data would not be sold or used for Google advertising. "Consumer trust is paramount to Fitbit. Strong privacy and security guidelines have been part of Fitbit's DNA since day one, and this will not change," the company said in a statement. From a report: Google already keeps a trove of information on people, including location data, search history and YouTube viewing history. The company also creates advertisement profiles of users based on information such as location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income. Even if Google claims it won't use Fitbit health data for advertising, the acquisition is probably bad for user privacy, said Paul Bischoff, a privacy advocate with Comparitech. Just because the companies say user data will not be used for advertising now does not mean that won't change, he said.

"Fitbit says health and wellness data will not be used for advertising, but that leaves plenty of other information for Google to gather, including users' locations, device info, friends' lists, messages, profile photos, participation in employee wellness programs, and usage logs," he said. The report notes that users can delete their accounts via the Fitbit website. The company said it would then permanently delete data associated with the account after a seven-day grace period.

California revealed for the first time an 18-month investigation into Facebook's privacy practices and accused the social media giant in a court filing on Wednesday of hampering the investigation. From a report: Revelation of the probe is the latest bad news for Facebook, which is already under investigation by 47 U.S. states. Some states, particularly New York and Nebraska, have raised concerns that Facebook and other big tech companies engage in anti-competitive practices, expose consumer data to potential data theft and push up advertising prices. Facebook had no immediate comment. The Facebook investigations are part of a larger landscape of probes of big tech firms by the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. California's investigation began in 2018 as a probe into the Cambridge Analytica scandal but "expanded over time to an investigation into whether Facebook has violated California law, by among other things, deceiving users and ignoring its own policies in allowing third parties broad access to user data," the agency said in a court filing.

A cache of leaked Facebook documents shows how the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, oversaw plans to consolidate the social network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a bargaining chip. NBC News reports: This trove comprises approximately 7,000 pages in total, of which about 4,000 are internal Facebook communications such as emails, web chats, notes, presentations and spreadsheets, primarily from 2011 to 2015. About 1,200 pages are marked as "highly confidential." Taken together, they show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook users' data -- including information about friends, relationships and photos -- as leverage over the companies it partnered with. In some cases, Facebook would reward partners by giving them preferential access to certain types of user data while denying the same access to rival companies.

For example, Facebook gave Amazon special access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising. In another case the messaging app MessageMe was cut off from access to data because it had grown too popular and could compete with Facebook. All the while, Facebook planned to publicly frame these moves as a way to protect user privacy, the documents show. State and federal authorities are now closely scrutinizing Facebook's business practices. In October, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that 47 attorneys general from states and U.S. territories plan to take part in a New York-led antitrust probe into Facebook. Over the summer, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings over antitrust concerns in Silicon Valley while the Federal Trade Commission also continues to examine the firm's practices.

Yael Eisenstat, a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech in the Digital Life Initiative and a former elections integrity head at Facebook, CIA officer, and White House adviser, writes for the Washington Post: As the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it's clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won't fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads -- ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they're run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, they can't avoid damaging democracies.

Early in my time there, I dug into the question of misinformation in political advertising. Posting in a "tribe" (Facebook's internal collaboration platform), I asked our teams working on political advertising whether we should incorporate the same tools for political ads that other integrity teams at Facebook were developing to address misinformation in pages and organic posts. It was unclear to me why the company was applying different, siloed policies and tools across the platform. Most users do not differentiate organic content from ads -- as I clearly saw on a trip to India, where we were testing our ads-integrity products -- so why were we expecting users to understand that we applied different standards to different forms of content that all just appear in their news feeds?

The fact that we were taking money for political ads and allowing campaigns and other political organizations to target users based on the vast amounts of data we had gathered meant political ads should have an even higher bar for integrity than what people were posting in organic content. We verified advertisers to run political ads, giving them a check mark and a "paid for by" label, and I questioned if that gave the false impression that we were vouching for the validity of the content, boosting its perceived credibility even though we weren't checking any facts or ensuring that ads weren't spreading false information. Most of my colleagues agreed. People wanted to get this right. But above me, there was no appetite for my pushing, and I was accused of "creating confusion."

On Hackaday's hosting site Hackaday.io, an electrical engineer with a background in semiconductor physics argues that Linux's small market share is due to a lack of marketing: Not only does [Linux] have dominance when raw computing ability is needed, either in a supercomputer or a webserver, but it must have some ability to effectively work as a personal computer as well, otherwise Android wouldn't be so popular on smartphones and tablets. From there it follows that the only reason that Microsoft and Apple dominate the desktop world is because they have a marketing group behind their products, which provides customers with a comfortable customer service layer between themselves and the engineers and programmers at those companies, and also drowns out the message that Linux even exists in the personal computing realm...

Part of the problem too is that Linux and most of its associated software is free and open source. What is often a strength when it comes to the quality of software and its flexibility and customizablity becomes a weakness when there's no revenue coming in to actually fund a marketing group that would be able to address this core communications issue between potential future users and the creators of the software. Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE and others all had varying successes, but this illistrates another problem: the splintered nature of open-source software causes a fragmenting not just in the software itself but the resources. Imagine if there were hundreds of different versions of macOS that all Apple users had to learn about and then decide which one was the best for their needs...

I have been using Linux exclusively since I ditched XP for 5.10 Breezy Badger and would love to live in a world where I'm not forced into the corporate hellscape of a Windows environment every day for no other reason than most people already know how to use Windows. With a cohesive marketing strategy, I think this could become a reality, but it won't happen through passionate essays on "free as in freedom" or the proper way to pronounce "GNU" or the benefits of using Gentoo instead of Arch. It'll only come if someone can unify all the splintered groups around a cohesive, simple message and market it to the public.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: In a move to fight spam and improve the health of the web, Firefox will hide those annoying notification popups by default starting next year, with the release of Firefox 72, in January 2020, ZDNet has learned from a Mozilla engineer.

The move comes after Mozilla ran an experiment back in April this year to see how users interacted with notifications, and also looked at different ways of blocking notifications from being too intrusive. Usage stats showed that the vast majority (97%) of Firefox users dismissed notifications, or chose to block a website from showing notifications at all...

As a result, Mozilla engineers have decided to hide the notification popup that drops down from Firefox's URL bar, starting with Firefox 72. If a website shows a notification, the popup will be hidden by default, and an icon added to the URL bar instead. Firefox will then animate the icon using a wiggle effect to let the user know there's a notification subscription popup available, but the popup won't be displayed until the user clicks the icon.
Mozilla is the first browser vendor to block notification popups by default, according to the article. It's already available in Firefox Nightly versions, but will be added to the stable branch in January.

"I think Mozilla's decision is good for the health of the web," Jérôme Segura, malware analyst at Malwarebytes tells ZDNet.

Apple launches its TV+ original video streaming service Friday, ending years of anticipation about the company's next act in television. But it will lack what many consumers want: a giant library of their favorite movies and shows. From a report: Over the past decade, the iPhone maker has explored building its own TV set, buying major content firms like Time Warner and partnering with cable companies on new TV set-top boxes. Instead, it landed on a combination of a video aggregation app, on-demand access to pay-TV channels like HBO and Starz and a $4.99 monthly subscription service of original movies and television shows. The subscription service will be available on millions of iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple TV boxes in 100 countries beginning Friday, just days ahead of Disney+ and months before comparable services from Comcast Corp. and AT&T Apple TV+ is currently focused entirely on original content, but its lack of a library of older fan favorites puts the service behind its rivals.

Apple's original slate of content includes fewer than 10 programs coming Friday and a total of 15 in the initial slate. Disney+ is scheduled to begin Nov. 12, and it, too, is advertising 15 titles from among its first round of originals. Similarly, Peacock from Comcast's NBCUniversal, is coming in April 2020 with 16 titles, while AT&T's HBO Max, launching at $14.99 a month in May 2020, has dozens in the works. Apple has said it plans to add new titles on a monthly basis to its service, meaning the $4.99 value will increase over time. Still, many people subscribe to the top video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video primarily for their giant back catalogs of content.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Fast Company: Hold your favorite graphic design tome close. We now know what the classic typeface Helvetica would look like if it came from the underworld. Yes, it will keep type enthusiasts up at night. The design darling Helvetica -- that ubiquitous sans-serif typeface developed by Max Miedinger in 1957, representative of the crisp Swiss design aesthetic of that period, and star of its own documentary by the same name -- has made a deal with the kerning devil. The results aren't pretty. They're not meant to be.

Zack Roif and Matthew Woodward, both associate creative directors at the international advertising agency R/GA, have released a new typeface available free to download, Hellvetica, and it will make all your worst kerning nightmares come true. While each character has the same form as the classic typeface it's riffing on, Hellvetica utilizes inconsistent, variable spacing between each letterform to give an overall effect that something has gone terribly astray. Nope, that wasn't a mistake. You might just say it was intentionally erroneous. The project is a study in playfulness and rule-breaking, "an exercise in going against the 'designer instincts' to fix up that awful kerning. Hundred percent break the rules," says Woodward. "Don't listen to your gut. Forget your training... and make that logo kern in hell!"

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has ardently defended Facebook's controversial political advertising policy hours after Twitter took a shot at its rival while announcing it will ban all political ads from its platform. From a report: "Although I've considered whether we should not carry [political] ads in the past, and I'll continue to do so, on balance so far I've thought we should continue," Zuckerberg told investors on a quarterly earnings call. "Ads can be an important part of voice - especially for candidates and advocacy groups the media might not otherwise cover so they can get their message into debates," he added. Facebook directed The Hill to Zuckerberg's remarks in response to an inquiry about Twitter's announcement. Zuckerberg and Facebook have been hit with a firestorm of criticism this month over its policy allowing politicians to lie in advertisements. For several weeks, Zuckerberg has engaged in an unusually public charm offensive as he seeks to defend Facebook's ad practices against critics who have accused the company of profiting off of and even encouraging political misinformation. Zuckerberg in the month of October offered interviews on Fox News and NBC, gave a public speech at Georgetown University, and testified before Congress about his view that Facebook should build policies to promote "free expression." Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tore into those arguments with the series of tweets announcing his company's policy change.

Twitter is planning to ban political ads from its service, the company announced Wednesday via a series of Tweets from its CEO Jack Dorsey. The ban will go into effect November 22. BuzzFeed News reports: Dorsey said the ban will cover ads about specific candidates and issues -- the broadest possible ban. The ban will also be global in nature, and not limited to the US. Some ads will be allowed to remain, including those encouraging people to vote. According to a Twitter spokesperson, news organizations are currently exempt from its rules on political advertising, and the company will release full details on exemptions next month.

In his Twitter thread, Dorsey took a swipe at Facebook's policy, noting that it is not credible to say "We're working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad... well... they can say whatever they want!" He also poked at Facebook's argument that banning tweets will favor incumbents, giving challengers less voice. "Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents," Dorsey said. "But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow."

The New York Times: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network's recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted -- even false ones -- in ads on the site. It asked Facebook's leaders to rethink the stance. Facebook's position on political advertising is "a threat to what FB stands for," said the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. "We strongly object to this policy as it stands." The message was written by Facebook's own employees. For the past two weeks, the text has been publicly visible on Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses to communicate internally. More than 250 employees have signed the letter, according to three people who have seen it and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.

While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook's 35,000-plus work force, it was one sign of the resistance that the company is now facing internally over how it treats political ads. Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said. For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions -- which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company -- show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook's woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season.

An anonymous reader quotes MediaPost: Faced with a new controversy related to online privacy, Comcast said this week that it doesn't draw on information about the sites broadband users visit for advertising or targeting. The company said Thursday that it deletes information every 24 hours about the domain names people navigate to online. "Millions of Comcast customers look up billions of addresses online every day," Chief Privacy Officer Christin McMeley wrote on the company's blog. "We've never used that data for any sort of marketing or advertising -- and we have never sold it to anyone."

The company's statement came one day after the publication Motherboard reported on Comcast's efforts to rally opposition on Capitol Hill to Google's plan to encrypt domain names... "While cloaked as enhancing user privacy, Google's DNS encryption will in fact vastly expand Google's control over and use of customer data, and will result in the complete commercialization of DNS data for Google's own ends," [Comcast's] presentation states. Google has said its plans were mischaracterized by broadband organizations, and that it has no intention of centralizing the web, or changing people's existing DNS providers to Google by default. "Any claim that we are trying to become the centralized encrypted DNS provider is inaccurate," a company spokesperson said last month...

One day after Motherboard posted the material reportedly prepared by Comcast, the cable provider touted its privacy policies in a blog post. "Where you go on the Internet is your business, not ours," McMeley wrote. "As your Internet Service Provider, we do not track the websites you visit or apps you use through your broadband connection. Because we don't track that information, we don't use it to build a profile about you and we have never sold that information to anyone."

Several years ago, Comcast opposed Federal Communications Commission privacy regulations that would have required broadband providers to obtain consumers' opt-in consent before drawing on their web-browsing activity for advertising. The FCC passed those rules in 2016, but the regulations were revoked by Congress the following year.

An anonymous reader shares a web site remembering October 27, 1994 as "the day that Wired Magazine flipped the switch on its first website, hotwired.com, starting a revolution in web content and advertising that still reverberates today." This site is dedicated to showing off one of the ads that ran on that site. No, it wasn't the "first" as there were a handful of other ads that ran on various sections of hotwired.com. This site is also here to tell the story of how that ad came to be, how it succeeded beyond anything we had imagined, and how we tried to set an example for how corporations could communicate with their audiences.
The site was created by two of the people originally involved in that ad campaign, and it even simulates the landing page that AT&T's ad would've taken you to back in 1994, including its announcement that "For those of you unfortunate souls who don't yet have fiber to the home, we've tried to keep file sizes small and download times short...."

CmdrTaco once wrote of the ad that "It's ugly, but no animation, no popups. It makes me a little nostalgic."

Archive.org's earliest capture of HotWired.com is from three years later, in 1997.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Facebook Inc said on Saturday that it had removed an ad which falsely claimed that U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham supported the Green New Deal, demonstrating that it will fact-check ads from political groups but not politicians.

The ad, which ran on Friday, was put up as a stunt by a left-leaning Political Action Committee, or PAC, called The Really Online Lefty League, to test Facebook's political ad policies... Facebook spokesman Tom Channick told Reuters on Friday that since the new ad came from a political action group, rather than a politician, it was eligible for review by the company's third-party fact-checking partners.

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes: You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don't want to know? When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about? Curiosity feels like it's outside your control, and trying to direct it sounds as ill conceived as forcing yourself to find a joke funny. But if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better. Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat.

Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is, of course, the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging and advertising. But it's good to know about your environment even if it doesn't promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don't expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones. Preschoolers play longer with a mechanical toy if it's difficult to deduce how it works.

Internet giant Comcast is lobbying U.S. lawmakers against plans to encrypt web traffic that would make it harder for internet service providers (ISPs) to determine your browsing history, Motherboard reported Wednesday, citing a lobbying presentation. From the report: The plan, which Google intends to implement soon, would enforce the encryption of DNS data made using Chrome, meaning the sites you visit. Privacy activists have praised Google's move. But ISPs are pushing back as part of a wider lobbying effort against encrypted DNS, according to the presentation. Technologists and activists say this encryption would make it harder for ISPs to leverage data for things such as targeted advertising, as well as block some forms of censorship by authoritarian regimes.

Mozilla, which makes Firefox, is also planning a version of this encryption. "The slides overall are extremely misleading and inaccurate, and frankly I would be somewhat embarrassed if my team had provided that slide deck to policy makers," Marshall Erwin, senior director of trust and safety at Mozilla, told Motherboard in a phone call after reviewing sections of the slide deck. "We are trying to essentially shift the power to collect and monetize peoples' data away from ISPs and providing users with control and a set of default protections," he added, regarding Mozilla's changes.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that 47 attorneys general from states and U.S. territories plan to take part in a New York-led antitrust probe into Facebook. Shares of Facebook fell as much as 2.2% on the news. From a report: The multistate investigation was first announced in September with participation from seven other states, but it has since expanded considerably. The probe will zero in on Facebook's dominance in the social media industry and whether it broke any state or federal laws as a result of any anticompetitive conduct related to that dominance. "After continued bipartisan conversations with attorneys general from around the country, today I am announcing that we have vastly expanded the list of states, districts, and territories investigating Facebook for potential antitrust violations," James said in a statement.

"Our investigation now has the support of 47 attorneys general from around the nation, who are all concerned that Facebook may have put consumer data at risk, reduced the quality of consumers' choices, and increased the price of advertising. As we continue our investigation, we will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook's actions stifled competition and put users at risk." It comes as Facebook already faces a separate antitrust investigation launched by the Federal Trade Commission in July.

An anonymous reader shares a report: By default, Google collects a vast amount of data on users' behavior, including a lifelong record of web searches, locations, and YouTube views. But amid a privacy backlash and ongoing regulatory threats, the company has started to hype its recently released privacy tools, like the ability to automatically delete some of the data it collects about you -- data that helps power its $116 billion ad business. [...] In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users' data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it's more than a few months old. "Anything up to one month is extremely valuable," says David Dweck, the head of paid search at digital ad firm WPromote. "Anything beyond one month, we probably weren't going to target you anyway." Dweck says that in the digital ad industry, recent activity is essential. If you start searching on Google for real estate or looking up housing values, for instance, Google might lump you into a "prospective home buyers" category for advertisers. That information becomes instantly valuable to realtors, appraisers, and lenders for ad targeting, and it could remain valuable for a while as other companies, such as painters or appliance brands, try to follow up on your home buying. Still, it's unusual for advertisers to target users based on their activity from months earlier, Dweck says.

TechCrunch's Josh Constine argues Facebook, along with the other social networks, should flat out refuse to run campaign advertisements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don't. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren't educated, and the media isn't objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don't balance. What we face is a self-reinforcing disinformation dystopia. That's why if Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube don't want to be the arbiters of truth in campaign ads, they should stop selling them. If they can't be distributed safely, they shouldn't be distributed at all. No one wants historically untrustworthy social networks becoming the honesty police, deciding what's factual enough to fly. But the alternative of allowing deception to run rampant is unacceptable. Until voter-elected officials can implement reasonable policies to preserve truth in campaign ads, the tech giants should go a step further and refuse to run them. Facebook recently formalized its policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads and not be forced to verify their claims with third-party fact-checkers. In response to the policy, Elizabeth Warren decided to run ads claiming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg endorses Trump because it's allowing his campaign lies.

In a statement responding to Warren's ad, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company believes political speech should be protected. "If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech," the Stone said.

dryriver writes: A study in the British Medical Journal that looked at 24 of the 100s of Medical apps available on Google Play found that 79% pass all sorts of user info -- including sensitive medical info like what your reported symptoms are and what medications you are taking in some cases -- on to third and fourth parties. A German-made and apparently very popular medical app named Ada was found to share user data with trackers like Facebook, Adjust and Amplitude for example. [Click here for the article in German.] The New York Times also warned recently about apps that want to retrieve/store your medical records.

From the conclusion of the study: "19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 "fourth parties"; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data."