@OatPotato @devnull @borup EU law does not permit legitimate interest for or cookies. Unless cookie is necessary for the provision of the information society services being accessed, consent is the only valid legal basis under ePrivacy Directives.
#AdTech lobbyists tried to get it bolted into the ePrivacy Regulation but that died in the drafting stage.
So, how long until the big AI firms turn to advertising to fund their spiralling costs? Not the obvious stuff, but LLM output that disingenuously favours certain products/services etc.
me: “ChatGPT, give me some possible treatments for plantar fasciitis”
ChatGPT: “Sure, there are many therapies available, but the most effective is ProductX, now on offer online etc”
Someone’s gonna tell em this is already happens, aren’t they?
#AI #adtech #adslop
After three years of relentless tracking, we’ve published a [paper](https://blogs.infoblox.com/threat-intelligence/vextrios-origin-story-from-spam-to-scam-to-adtech/) that, for the first time, exposes the true identities behind VexTrio. This research connects real names to the various companies that form the VexTrio ecosystem. It begins with the origin story—how a group of Italians launched a successful spam and dating business. Over time, VexTrio expanded its operations into malicious adtech and online scams. For over a decade, the group employed deceptive tactics to defraud countless innocent internet users. These illegitimate gains funded the extravagant lifestyles of VexTrio’s key figures—who, despite increasing scrutiny, have yet to be fully stopped.
We’re deeply grateful to all the contributors who helped us reach this research milestone, especially @rmceoin and Tord from [Qurium](https://www.qurium.org/).
I subscribe to newspaper not because I prefer reading paper version - it is because ad tech and survelliance capitalism made internet unbearable, therefore I do not subscribe to any online one 
It is not ok to put tracking pixels, capture location and calculate where and for how long my screen is focused at. It's not ok to broker peronal private data to "target" more ads towards me. And it is definitely not ok to build browsers that are intended to maximize tracking with different initiatives tried to be pushed as "standards". Screw content algorithms that restricts me from reading full comment feed supposedly giving me only the "relevant" ones.
Big techs think they can ignore EU GDPR because, you know, they are bringing "innovation". Screw that. That is not innovation - that is unethical business that should be declared illegal 
Amazon to Inject Ads into Alexa+ Conversations, Sparking Privacy Debate
#AI #Amazon #Alexa #Privacy #AdTech #BigTech #AIAssistants ##VoiceAssistants
[Doctorow] Data brokers and 'personalized pricing' #adtech
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed
On August 14, TWiT upgrades our ad-tech stack with https://Magellan.ai.
Campaign visibility is getting sharper—with a modern dashboard and better performance metrics for our partners.
Read More: https://twit.tv/posts/inside-twit/twit-upgrades-ad-tech-stack-magellan
#PodcastAds #AdTech
Like CEOs at Coldplay concerts, we keep finding malicious adtech hiding behind well-known advertising brands. While these platforms may appear credible, they allow malicious actors access to their platform, and profit from their successes.
Our posts often focus on adtech operators because they are the ones who manage the infrastructure. But they are not the only ones profiting from this business. Affiliates play a big role by driving traffic (aka visitors) to the adtech platform (TDS).
Malicious affiliates do this by tricking visitors into clicking hidden links or manipulating pages to redirect them automatically. They are so good at it that they generate a profit just due to the sheer volume of traffic they drive into the platform.
Legitimate affiliates do this by posting what they believe to be normal ads on their web pages, tempted by promises of big rewards. Unfortunately for them, this is rarely the reality, and there are many reports of affiliates being underpaid or not paid at all. Additionally, affiliates risk damaging their own brand image – no one wants their legitimate website redirecting to malware, right?
As a user, regardless of how you find yourself diverted into a malicious TDS, if you happen to fit the profile then you face the risk of being sent to a malicious landing page. Scams, disinformation, malware…you name it.
As there are many players involved in this scheme, we’ve created an infographic that highlights who they are and how they fit into the malicious adtech landscape.
Have you come across any of these shady platforms or, worse, been lured into becoming part of the scheme? Let us know!
"The Pay-or-Okay model adopted across the online news industry and platforms like Facebook and Instagram is “manipulative” and cannot be considered a free choice, a new report from the digital rights group noyb has found.
The report comes as the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), which oversees the implementation of privacy rules in the EU, is considering formal guidelines regarding the use of the model, also known as Consent-or-Pay.
Organizations like noyb, a Vienna, Austria-based non-profit, have long called on regulators to adopt a stricter approach to Pay-or-Okay, which they say violates the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to the group, Pay-or-Okay does not provide users a genuine choice to refuse tracking, as required by privacy rules, because the alternative is too expensive.
“Right now, users are effectively and unlawfully nudged towards ‘consenting’ to being tracked. The EDPB now has the opportunity to take a clear stance on this issue in its upcoming guidelines,” said Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb."
Great article about the current state of #adtech
https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2025/07/23/the-end-of-everything-except-the-actual-ad-tech-problems/
This is how your phone "listens to you"....
#surveillancecapitalism
@DS_Stiftung @Frederick_Richter
Stilletjes stappen supermarkten in de handel in persoonsgegevens voor advertenties #adtech - dit gebeurt ook in Nederland
The problem with that strategy is that its being crowded out by the enormous resources that #adtech has dedicated to further discover and exploit human weakness, #tiktok being the prime example.
The analogy is trying to free an enslaved drug addict by offering them a diet of fruits and veggies. Its clearly hopeless.
What could work is an invention that is at the same time wholesome for the individual and society *and* very attractive *and* doable on a miseable budget 
Incredibly bad odds.
For the #fediverse and friends this raises some pretty stark challenges:
Clearly the promise of human-centricity, agency, #dataprivacy etc. does not resonate with the masses.
But importantly, it does not resonate with their appointed political stewards and assorted elites either: if not outright captured, they have made their Faustian bargains and are intensely relaxed about the #adtech dystopia.
Another potential wedge for disruption would be to offer something genuinely new...
#Netflix reported $11.08 billion in revenue for the second quarter, a 16% increase from the previous year. Netflix is focused on building its #adtech platform to double #advertising revenue this year and plans to introduce #interactiveads in the second half of 2025. https://www.theverge.com/news/709288/netflix-q2-2025-earningsdouble-ad-revenue?eicker.news #tech #media #news
@arstechnica Google is #AdTech so just wait for the Gemini-powered profiling and contextual advertising that’s coming for you and your logged in, 1st party Google ID.
"“I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location, or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there’s a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to,” writes Tau.
Unraveling the story of how these strangers—everyone from government intelligence agents and local law enforcement officers to private investigators and employees of ad tech companies—gained access to our personal information is the ambitious task Tau sets for himself, and he begins where you might expect: the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
At no other point in US history was the government’s appetite for data more voracious than in the days after the attacks, says Tau. It was a hunger that just so happened to coincide with the advent of new technologies, devices, and platforms that excelled at harvesting and serving up personal information that had zero legal privacy protections.
Over the course of 22 chapters, Tau gives readers a rare glimpse inside the shadowy industry, “built by corporate America and blessed by government lawyers,” that emerged in the years and decades following the 9/11 attacks. In the hands of a less skilled reporter, this labyrinthine world of shell companies, data vendors, and intelligence agencies could easily become overwhelming or incomprehensible. But Tau goes to great lengths to connect dots and plots, explaining how a perfect storm of business motivations, technological breakthroughs, government paranoia, and lax or nonexistent privacy laws combined to produce the “digital panopticon” we are all now living in."
#Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection SurveillanceCapitalism #AdTech #DataBrokers
ORG's new report exposes Meta’s intrusive profiling of its users.
With the introduction of Generative AI to Meta’s ad tools, existing problems with opacity will get worse.
Anna Dent, author of 'Profiling by Proxy'.
Privacy over profits!
We're fighting back against Meta's use of personal data to sell ads.
Meta should give us options for opting-out of stalker ads. Until they do, you can use our tool to make this request.
Act now to #StopStalkerAds 
By further automating ad audience selection on Meta with GenAI, we'll have less chance of understanding why certain people are seeing which ads.
It may also make it even harder to detect the use of proxy data that let advertisers dodge anti-discrimination or data processing laws.
