Cambridge Analytica

Meta’s sparse settlement payout ends the Cambridge Analytica scandal with a whimper; Google brings dynamic host-read ads to YouTube; and HUMAN uncovers IVT hiding in mobile app downloads.

Judge Mehta defends his light touch in addressing Google’s search monopoly; the de minimis exemption for imports is over, and it could ding Q4 ad spend; and a whistleblower says Meta ignored WhatsApp’s privacy lapses.

Social media companies don’t want to be called “social media” anymore. Plus: Claritas has hired Jefferies as a banker and is pursuing a sale.

Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym.

The anonymous alphanumeric string made and lost fortunes in its short but eventful life. It was best-known for something it wasn’t actually designed to do: targeting ads.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Ad-tagonists Joshua Lowcock, a longtime leader at agency UM Worldwide, where he most recently served as global chief media officer, exited on Friday. His departure comes only a few weeks after UM’s chief privacy and responsibility officer, Arielle Garcia, left the agency, […]

Zitron argues that the internet is being ruined by the Big Tech players that control it and that advertising needs to lose its sense of entitlement over everyone’s data.

Political advertising is in full swing for the US midterm elections. We go deep into where candidates are spending their digital ad dollars and how they’re using data, with special guest Grace Briscoe, who oversees some 850 ad campaigns as head of political business for Basis.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Courting Disaster A California district court judge has scathingly reprimanded Google’s legal team. Google requested to withhold 6,232 of 6,322 documents in a privacy suit brought by Chrome users.  Google “cavalierly” claimed the review was justified but had no justification to support its claim, […]

Over the last year and a half, Facebook has been embroiled in so many controversial issues, it’s hard to keep track: privacy problems, the spread of misinformation, election interference, improperly secured data, antitrust concerns and, most recently, Facebook’s policy on paid political advertising, which is rubbing nearly everyone, including some of Facebook’s own employees, the […]

Facebook said Friday that it’s suspending “tens of thousands” of apps from its platform for data usage violations. The suspended apps are associated with around 400 developers. The purge is part of Facebook’s continuing investigation into how third-party app developers use Facebook data, sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018. So far, the […]

An American associate professor of media design is perhaps not the first person who comes to mind as the driving force behind an effort to test the limits of European data protection law, but there you go. David Carroll, who teaches at the New School’s Parsons School of Design in New York City, is partway […]

2018 was the year Facebook’s skeletons really came skittering out of the closet, and the drip, drip, drip of bad news is seemingly endless. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Facebook shared more data with more partners than previously disclosed, including contact information, private messages and friend lists. Facebook’s response to the Times […]

Facebook is setting up a kiosk in midtown Manhattan to dole out free hot cocoa and privacy advice. (Yes, privacy advice.) At a one-day public pop-up event Thursday in Bryant Park, Facebook reps will answer questions about how people can use their privacy settings and manage their advertising experience on the platform. The event, a […]

Another day, another Facebook blunder, mishap or scandal – or so it’s felt since the Cambridge Analytica storyline started to unfurl in mid-March. But the nonstop headlines and incremental news hits make it easy to lose historical perspective. (As a colleague recently noted with surprise, “Wait, the Cambridge Analytica news only came out five months […]

Getting in bed with Facebook sometimes means waking up alone – and without your wallet. Social analytics platform Crimson Hexagon is experiencing an unpleasant prolonged morning after following a report late last week accusing the company of tapping into public user data for government contracts in possible violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook suspended Crimson […]

It’s been a weird four months for Aleksandr Kogan. The 33-year-old went from an obscure research psychologist at Cambridge University to one of the villains at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Kogan, who testified Tuesday before a Senate Commerce subcommittee, apologized for his role in the controversy, but disputes that the data provided […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. End Of An Error Cambridge Analytica has shut down. “The Company is immediately ceasing all operations and the boards have applied to appoint insolvency practitioners Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP to act as the independent administrator for Cambridge Analytica,” the company said in a statement. […]

“This has been an intense year – I can’t believe we’re only four months in.” Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose on Tuesday with a joke, and he got a few chuckles from the gathered crowd of 5,000 developers. Facebook’s recent crackdown on API access and data flows in response to […]

Facebook’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, faced five hours of intense and technically savvy grilling by members of a parliamentary committee on Thursday. The takeaway: UK regulators don’t trust Facebook. To put it more pointedly in the words of British conservative MP Julian Knight: Facebook is a “morality-free zone” with no respect for consumer privacy or the […]

Facebook might be weathering more headwinds than you can shake a stick at right now, but that didn’t stop it from posting gangbuster earnings on Wednesday. Revenue for the quarter clocked in at $11.97 billion, up 49% year over year – beating the Street’s estimate of $11.41 billion. Click here to read the release. Proof […]

Although a handful of advertisers have suspended their Facebook campaigns in the wake of the platform’s ongoing data scandal, most are staying the course. “Both advertisers and developers are very understanding about having some features removed that they were using,” said Mark Rabkin, Facebook’s VP of ads and business platform, who took the reins from […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Other Giant Google deserves some of the flack that Facebook is almost exclusively catching in the wake of its Cambridge Analytica scandal, writes Christopher Mims for The Wall Street Journal. Mims argues that Google has lax standards for merging data between its various […]

A blog post by Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer on Wednesday detailed restrictions on data access for a number of its APIs, including events, groups and pages. Read it. (The blog also revealed in that post that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles, rather than 50 million, as was originally widely reported.) Developer […]

With Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation taking effect May 25, Facebook must alter some of its business practices regardless of any fallout due to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The Cambridge Analytica revelations merely behoove Facebook to move faster and fix things in light of macro privacy changes hitting the EU. The most recent example is […]

NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said Facebook faces big repercussions because it breached users’ trust. “The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Facebook’s business model is based on data people don’t [always know] they’re sharing and then selling that data … to a buyer Facebook [doesn’t even] know,” Burke said Tuesday in response to Facebook’s […]

Cambridge Analytica was notorious long before its controversial use of Facebook data became news. But even before it defected from Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign to Donald Trump’s in 2016, the company was angling for marketing dollars. In September of that year, it had about 25 Fortune 500 businesses in its funnel, AdExchanger was told at […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Joshua Lowcock, executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer at UM Worldwide. The advertising industry often talks about trust – trust between advertisers and their agencies, trust between […]

#WheresZuck? Posting a mea culpa on Facebook after nearly five days of conspicuous silence. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to explain what happened and to outline fixes. He promised Facebook would investigate all apps that had “access to large amounts […]

The Cambridge Analytica debacle demonstrated that Facebook has no systematic way of knowing what happens to data once it leaves the platform. What happened wasn’t a data breach – but that isn’t what matters. “Partners are bound by agreements that say they’re not supposed to share the data out, but there’s no way to regulate it, […]