Bad news: your car is a spy. If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity. Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt and how hard you hit the brakes.
Meta has been temporarily banned from running behavioral advertising on Facebook and Instagram in Norway — unless it obtains users’ consent to the processing. The urgent order of provisional measures on Meta’s business, which has been made by Norway’s data protection authority, the Datatilsynet, applies for an initial three-month period.
Mark your calendar European friends: July 4th could soon be celebrated as independence-from-Meta’s-surveillance-capitalism-day… A long-anticipated judgement handed down today by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) looks to have comprehensively crushed the social media giant’s ability to keep flouting EU privacy law by denying users a free choice over its tracking and profiling.
Meta on Monday was fined a record 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States, in a major ruling against the social media company for violating European Union data protection rules.
The president attempted to rally bipartisan support to finally resolve a number of long-standing privacy, safety, and competition issues facing the tech industry. Over the more than hourlong address, Biden called on Congress to pass new rules protecting user data privacy and boosting competition in the tech industry.
Meta suffered a major defeat on Wednesday that could severely undercut its Facebook and Instagram advertising business after European Union regulators found it had illegally forced users to effectively accept personalized ads.
Tanya O’Carroll, a technology and human rights campaigner, filed the suit at London’s High Court challenging Facebook’s “surveillance advertising,” she said. Facebook violates general data protection regulations by processing and profiling her personal data that’s then tailored for the advertisements, she argues.
If passed into law, it will also place restrictions on profiling younger users for targeted advertising, mandate the introduction of ‘age-appropriate’ content policies, and ban serving up behavioural nudges that might trick them into weakening their privacy protections.
Lawmakers have proposed new legislation that they say would ban surveillance-based advertising. The legislation would target the underlying practice of targeted or personalized ads that facilitates surveillance-based advertising itself.
A trio of Democrats in Congress announced new legislation on Tuesday aimed at banning what has been described as “surveillance advertising.”...The legislation comes just months after the advocacy group Accountable Tech petitioned the FTC to begin cracking down on surveillance advertising. The group cited an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in July that urged the FTC to investigate “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.”
Three US lawmakers on Tuesday tabled the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, a proposal aimed at banning the use of personal data for targeted advertising. The legislation would effectively ban advertisers from using personal data other than broad location targeting. It would still allow for contextual advertising based on the type of content with which the user is interacting.
Three Democratic members of Congress on Tuesday introduced new legislation to ban "surveillance advertising" -- the use of personal data for targeted advertising. The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act would upend business for Facebook, Google DoubleClick and other companies that facilitate personalized advertising.
A new bill seeks to dramatically reshape the online advertising landscape to the detriment of companies like Facebook, Google and data brokers that leverage deep stores of personal information to make money from targeted ads. The bill, the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced by Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) in the House and Cory Booker (D-NJ) in the Senate, would dramatically limit the ways that tech companies serve ads to their users, banning the use of personal data altogether.
This week, the progressive-leaning advocacy group Accountable Tech petitioned the agency to ban “surveillance advertising” as an unfair method of competition, defining the practice as targeted advertising based on consumers’ personal data. As an example of the harms that an alleged lack of competition among online platforms can cause, the group cited a recent Wall Street Journal article about the impact of Facebook Inc.’s Instagram app on teens’ mental health.
The s-word is slowly seeping into government parlance as a way to illustrate the effects of data collection as the source of revenue for digital businesses. When Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat representing the Silicon Valley region, admonished the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter during a March congressional hearing on disinformation, she said she planned to introduce “a bill that is going to ban this business model of surveillance advertising.” She didn’t provide any more detail on the bill and has yet to introduce it.
Leaders of 14 privacy-oriented businesses, including the companies behind web browser Vivaldi, encrypted email service ProtonMail and search engine DuckDuckGo, are joining more than 50 transatlantic civil society groups in calling for a ban on surveillance-based advertising and urging the U.S. to enact federal privacy legislation.
An international coalition of consumer protection, digital and civil rights organizations and data protection experts has added its voice to growing calls for a ban on what’s been billed as “surveillance-based advertising”.
In many circles, the targeted ads debate has moved from opt in or out to serious debate over banning ‘surveillance advertising’. Those who see a role for responsible uses of data for marketing should recognize the major efforts needed to respond to concerns.
Though Facebook does not offer advertisers categories that explicitly identify people’s health conditions, The Markup identified dozens of ads for prescription pharmaceuticals targeted at people with “interests” in topics like “bourbon,” “oxygen,” and “Diabetes mellitus awareness.”
In advance of Apple’s software update requiring apps to ask users for permission to track their behavior across other apps and websites, the Ban Surveillance Advertising coalition is launching a grassroots education and mobilization campaign urging consumers to opt out of this immoral practice.
Prosecutors allege, he bought a $15 device that converts AR-15 semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic machine guns, making the purchase through a website that advertised to Boogaloo Facebook groups and promised to donate some of its profits to the family of Duncan Lemp, who became a Boogaloo martyr after he was killed in a police raid.
For months after it banned violent extremist groups, Facebook's advertising preference system, which lets advertisers deliver targeted ads, continued to identify and categorize some people as interested in militias.
Democratic lawmakers are readying a bill to ban “surveillance advertising,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-California) said Thursday at a House hearing. “Your algorithms use unseemly amounts of data to keep users on your platform, because that leads to more ad revenue,” Eshoo told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the hearing, “Disinformation Nation: Social Media's Role in Promoting Extremism and Disinformation.”
Thirty-eight different advocacy organizations have come together to Ban Surveillance Advertising. They argue that as long as social media platforms profit from collecting more user data—so they can use it to target ads—then they will do whatever possible to hook and keep users on their sites, amplifying “echo chambers, radicalization, and viral lies.”
When the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google testify later this week at a House hearing, a number of familiar policy reforms will be on the table. Antitrust. Section 230. Privacy legislation. A new campaign wants to add another bold idea into the mix: “Ban Surveillance Advertising.”
Ahead of another big tech vs Congress ‘grab your popcorn’ grilling session, scheduled for March 25 — when US lawmakers will once again question the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter on the unlovely topic of misinformation — a coalition of organizations across the privacy, antitrust, consumer protection and civil rights spaces has called for a ban on “surveillance advertising”, further amplifying the argument that “big tech’s toxic business model is undermining democracy”.
Dozens of progressive groups said Monday they were banding together in a new coalition to counter the influence of Big Tech — and they will first aim at the targeted advertising that’s the lifeblood of Facebook and Google.
NewsGuard reported that in most cases, the advertisements were likely inadvertent, placed by algorithms on programmatic ad-buying platforms like Google’s DV360 rather than intentionally by the brands involved... NewsGuard said the data demonstrate the vast scale at which programmatic advertising supports the online misinformation ecosystem.
The lawsuit claims that Facebook knowingly overestimated its 'potential reach' metric for advertisers, largely by failing to correct for fake and duplicate accounts. The filing states that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged problems with the metric in 2017, and product manager Yaron Fidler proposed a fix that would correct the numbers. But the company allegedly refused to make the changes, arguing that it would produce a 'significant' impact on revenue.
Shareholders in Home Depot and the advertising giant Omnicom have filed resolutions asking the companies to investigate whether the money they spent on advertisements may have helped spread hate speech and misinformation.
‘Facebook has spent years facilitating fringe voices who use the platform to organize and amplify calls for violence,’ said TTP Director Katie Paul. ‘As if that weren't enough, Facebook's advertising microtargeting is directing domestic extremists toward weapons accessories and armor that can make their militarized efforts more effective, all while Facebook profits.’