Monthly Archives: April 2021

Privacy-centric browser Brave and browser extension DuckDuckGo have decided to block Googles proposed method of tracking and targeting ads to groups of people without cookies, and now Mozilla tells Digiday it, too, has no plans to implement Googles FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts in its Firefox browser.

We are currently evaluating many of the privacy preserving advertising proposals, including those put forward by Google, but have no current plans to implement any of them at this time, a Mozilla spokesperson told Digiday.

Those proposals thwarted by Mozilla and others have been put forward by Google as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative which includes a variety of tactics the company has introduced some developed in conjunction with other participants in the open-source environment of the Worldwide Web Consortium to mimic long-used practices enabled with third-party cookies for tracking individuals, targeting ads and measuring their effectiveness.

We dont buy into the assumption that the industry needs billions of data points about people, that are collected and shared without their understanding, to serve relevant advertising, said the Mozilla spokesperson. The company enables enhanced tracking protection by default in its Firefox browser, which is used by less than 4% of global web users, according to Statcounter.

Brave, another browser marketed as a privacy-protecting alternative to Googles Chrome browser, said on April 14 it has removed FLoC, citing in a blog post its concerns that the technique, harms privacy directly and by design because it tells sites about your browsing history in a new way that browsers categorically do not today. Though a reliable measure of Braves user base is not available, the companys share of the browser market is likely a sliver of even what browsers like Firefox or Apples Safari which garners around 20% of the market have.

DuckDuckGo, yet another company that sells itself as a defender of personal data privacy, also said earlier this month it will let people using its Chrome extension tool block FLoC. The company also said it has configured its search product to opt out from FLoC tracking whether or not people use its browser extension.

Theadversarial drumbeats knocking FLoC grow louder even as testing of the targeting approach gets underway in the U.S. and other countries. However, as privacy concerns stall trials in Europe and others including a U.S. lawmaker, criticize its potential discriminatory impact, Googles FLoC will live on for now in the search giants own Chrome browser, which happens to be the worlds most prolific browser. That means advertisers, publishers and Googles ad tech partners will have every intention of giving it a try.

Even if Chrome is the only browser where [FLoC is] enabled, it has massive scale, said Ian Trider, vp of real time bidding platform operations at ad tech firm Centro, who added that ad inventory wont be affected if other browsers dont allow it. Ads can be served on sites loading on those browsers. FLoC just wont be available as a targeting technique, he said.

Why FLoC needs browsers

FLoC needs browser support in order to work. The cookieless targeting method uses an algorithmic process inside the browser to generate cohorts composed of at least one thousand people based on the sites they have visited in recent days, the content on pages they viewed and other factors. Google assigns a FLoC ID to each cohort, or group of people, without including any individual-level data. FLoC is one of Googles ways of replacing the tracking and targeting enabled by the third-party cookies the company plans to disable in Chrome by January 2022. The idea is to use behavioral information showing what sites people visit to track and target them in aggregate rather than individually, which Google claims protects peoples privacy.

Notably, when Google announced in March it would rely on FLoC and other Privacy Sandbox methods in its industry leading ad exchange, it did so through a blog postwritten byDavid Temkin, director of product management, ads privacy and trustat Google. Before joining Google in 2020, Temkin served as chief product officer at Brave Software, which makes the very Brave browser that is saying no to FLoC.

Privacy and data ethics advocates arguethat, by lumping people into groups based on their online and mobile site visits, Google will create a whole new level of personal data that can be attached to other individual-level profiles. They worry the FLoC process could unfairly categorize people into groups, which would enable discriminatory targeting or data use. Meanwhile, FLoC has piqued the interest of at least one U.S. lawmaker. U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York in March raised concerns about bias and disparate impact of FLoC when addressing Google CEO Sundar Pichai during a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on disinformation.

How browsers block FLoC

Some browsers dont have to do anything to stop FLoC though. Browsers including Brave and Microsoft Edge are built on Chromium, the open-source code that serves as the foundation for Google Chrome. As a result, those browsers would actually have to enable specific code to get FLoC to work.

[FLoC] wouldnt have been enabled unless Brave chose to enable it, said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy advocacy organization, who has been digging deep into how FLoC functions. The same goes for Edge, he said. FLoC is not turned on in Edge right now because Microsoft would have had to go out of their way to do that, he said, adding, In the future Google might make it so that you have to turn the FLoC switch off, but thats not the case now. A Google spokesperson did not respond to an email asking the company to confirm that Chromium-based browsers need to actively enable FLoC support.

Krzysztof Franaszek, a computer scientist who has also investigated how FLoC works, backed up that assessment.Whereas Google Chrome has code for tracking which websites you visit and uses that to calculate [a FLoC ID] to group you, he said, Brave has no such underlying mechanism. As for browser extensions like DuckDuckGos, he said, the extension cannot strip out code from Chrome. Instead, what that extension does is it blocks any websites or Javascript from reading a users FLoC ID. So if a user visits an e-commerce website or some website that uses FLoC IDs to try to target consumers, the extension blocks the website from being able to see or access the FLoC ID.

Publishers are becoming conscientious FLoC objectorsDuring Googles FLoC trial phase, publisher websites will be tracked by the system by default, so website publishers that do not want their sites included have to opt out from FLoC tracking, which is not simple to do. Publishers need to add a specific http header to their sites to block FLoC, and a few including The Guardian and The Markuphave done so. Google researchers expect publishers of sensitive content or content that people might not want to be associated with Googles new tracking regime like healthcare providers, banks or porn sites to join that club of conscientious FLoC objectors.

In general, advertisers and their agencies are testing FLoC along with a variety of other tracking and targeting methods that dont use third-party cookies, and theyre not surprised that browsers made by companies other than Google wont enable FLoC. Considering Chromes massive user base, said Amanda Martin,vp of enterprise partnerships at digital agency Goodway Group, Chrome has the dominance to solve for the deprecation of the third-party cookie in a siloed approach.

However, she added, If that doesnt raise flags from regulatory agencies is different question.

https://digiday.com/?p=410971

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Browser makers, now including Mozillas Firefox, are already ditching Googles proposed cookieless ad targeting method FLoC - Digiday

This week brought a bunch of deals on new gadgets, including Amazon's rotating Echo Show 10 and Google's Nest Hub. The former dropped to a new all-time low while the latter remains 20 percent off at various retailers. AirPods Pro are more than $50 off right now, and Amazon Prime members can snag the Fire TV Stick Lite for only $20. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

Google Nest Audio smart speaker sitting on a wooden tablet next to a green plant, against a blue wall.

The Nest Audio smart speaker is still $20 off across the web, bringing to down to $80. It already packed a lot of value into its normal $100 price tag, but it's an even better buy at this sale price. We gave it a score of 87 for its minimalist design, solid audio quality and good use of the Google Assistant.

Buy Nest Audio at Best Buy - $80 Buy Nest Audio at Walmart - $80 Buy Nest Audio at B&H Photo - $80 Buy Nest Audio at Google - $80

AirPods Pro

Apple's AirPods Pro are down to $197 on Amazon, which is over $50 off their normal price. While not an all-time low, it's the best price we've seen in a while. We gave them a score of 87 for their solid ANC, comfortable design and hands-free Siri support.

Buy Apple AirPods Pro at Amazon - $197

2020 Apple MacBook Air

The latest MacBook Air with the new M1 chipset and 512GB of storage is $100 off at Amazon, bringing it down to $1,149. If you always need more storage than the base models allow, this is a great opportunity to save some money while upgrading your laptop. We gave the MacBook Air M1 a score of 94 for its blazing fast performance, excellent keyboard and trackpad, good battery life and lack of fan noise.

Buy MacBook Air M1 (512GB) at Amazon - $1,149

Amazon Echo Show 10 with its screen turned on, sitting on a countertop in front of a wooden cutting board.

The new Echo Show 10 remains on sale for $200, which is $50 off its normal price. We gave Amazon's newest smart display a score of 83 for its excellent audio quality, its camera that can double as a home surveillance lens and its convenient pan-and-zoom feature during video calls.

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Buy Echo Show 10 at Amazon - $200

Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite

Prime members can still grab the Fire TV Stick Lite for only $20, which is $10 off its normal price. The most affordable of Amazon's streaming dongles, the TV Stick Lite runs on a quad-core processor with 8GB of storage, and it supports FHD video with HDR. It also comes with a simplified version of the Alexa voice remote, so you can control the stick using voice commands.

Buy Fire TV Stick Lite at Amazon - $20

DJI Osmo Pocket

BuyDig still has the DJI Osmo Pocket for $199, which is $170 off its normal price. It's a tiny, gimbal-mounted camera that uses 3-axis stabilization and a 1/2.3-inch sensor to shoot smooth video in up to 4K. It also has built-in dual microphones and supports microSD cards up to 256GB.

Buy Osmo Pocket at BuyDig - $199

A gaming PC with a tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse, shining with rainbow lighting.

Omaze has a sweepstakes going on right now in which you can win $20,000 to build the PC of your dreams. It costs nothing to enter, but if you do pay for additional entries, those donated funds benefit Gamers Outreach, an organization that provides video games and other recreation for children in hospitals. You can also use the code AFF50 to get 50 bonus entries as well.

Pricing and availability is subject to change. No donation or payment necessary to enter or win this sweepstakes. See official rules on Omaze.

Enter to win at Omaze

One of our favorite budget robot vacuums, the Shark Ion RV761, is on sale for $200 at Best Buy. That's $50 off its normal price and a great deal on a robo-vac that packs a ton of value for the money. It cleans hard and carpeted floors well and has an easy-to-use mobile app with which you can start and stop the device as well as set cleaning schedules.

Buy Shark Ion RV761 at Best Buy - $200

One of Shark's high-end robot vacuums with clean base is down to $419 at Wellbots when you use the code ROBOENGADGET at checkout. In addition to automatically emptying debris into its base after each cleaning, this model has intelligent home mapping, self-cleaning brush rolls that help trap pet hair and voice control with Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant.

Buy Shark IQ RV1001AE at Wellbots - $419

You can get 25 percent off of most Master & Dynamic products in the company's friend and family sale by using the code BFF25 at checkout. While the new MW08 are excluded from this sale, you can still grab other solid headphones and earbuds like the MW07 Plus and the MW65.

Shop Master and Dynamic sale

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

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This week's best deals: $20 off Google's Nest Audio and more - Yahoo Tech

Google reportedly ran a secret project called Project Bernanke that relied on bidding data collected from advertisers using its ad exchange to benefit the companys own ad system, The Wall Street Journal reported. First discovered by newswire service MLex, the name of the project was visible in an inadvertently unredacted document Google had filed as part of an antitrust lawsuit in Texas.

A federal judge has since let Google refile the document under seal. But according to the Journal, Bernanke was not disclosed to outside advertisers, and proved lucrative for Google, generating hundreds of millions of dollars for the company. Texas filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in December, alleging that the search giant was using anticompetitive tactics in which Bernanke was a major part.

Google wrote in the unredacted filing that data from Project Bernanke was comparable to data maintained by other buying tools, according to the Journal. The company was able to access historical data about bids made through Google Ads, to change bids by its clients and boost the clients chances of winning auctions for ad impressions, putting rival ad tools at a disadvantage. Texas cited in court documents an internal presentation from 2013 in which Google said Project Bernanke would bring in $230 million in revenue for that year.

Why Google chose to name the secret project Bernanke is not clear. Ben Bernanke, who was chair of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, is probably the best-known Bernanke in the public sphere.

In an email to The Verge, a Google spokesperson said the complaint by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton misrepresents many aspects of our ad tech business. We look forward to making our case in court.

Update April 11th 10:54AM ET: Adds comment from Google spokesperson

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Google reportedly ran secret Project Bernanke that boosted its own ad-buying system over competitors - The Verge

Nicholas Mattei, an assistant professor of computer science, is an expert on the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)

Artificial intelligence experts from Tulane University and the University of Maryland have received a Google Scholar Research Award to develop better ways of promoting diversity and fairness in a variety of pipeline and selection problems, including hiring, graduate school admission and customer acquisition.

Nicholas Mattei, an assistant professor of computer science at Tulane, and John Dickerson, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, received the $60,000 award as part of the Google Research Scholars program, an initiative by Google to support early career professors who are pursing research in fields relevant to Google.

Our work aims to operationalize and incorporate responsible AI practices and techniques into real-world systems, informed by data from real processes at our two universities, Mattei said. Were not going to develop a solution in a year. Our intention is to produce an open-source toolkit, preliminary studies and whitepaper to be discussed by policymakers.

This research directly addresses questions of transparency, constraints, and fairness when working with complex, multi-stage decision-making problems."

Nicholas Mattei, assistant professor of computer science at Tulane

The work is an outgrowth of their recent paper, We Need Fairness and Explainability in Algorithmic Hiring, presented virtually at the 2020 Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Conference.

Our proposal focuses on graduate admissions but is broadly applicable to any problem where we need to expend a limited set of resources to validate and select a small group, Mattei said.

In focusing specifically on graduate admissions, a form of academic hiring, Mattei and Dickerson will look at two key factors related to admissions how to allocate aspects of the process, such as budget and interview slots, and how to explain decisions made by their algorithm in a transparent and compliant way.

Several recent reports related to algormithic hiring, including one from the non-profit UpTurn, motivates us to focus on how to allocate additional human resources to these problems, and we feel that we must treat issues of bias and fairness as first-order concerns in any system that may have an impact on people, Dickerson said.

This research directly addresses questions of transparency, constraints, and fairness when working with complex, multi-stage decision making problems where we need to end up with a recommendation or selection at the end. This type of sequential decision-making problem is typically optimized using multi-armed bandit algorithms, Mattei said. But these algorithms may optimize for criteria that we may not intend, or may not even be legal.

Such algorithms are in widespread use across many of Googles core areas, including recommendation and advertising and hence understanding them in detail is critically important, he said.

Mattei and Dickerson believe their work will support their thesis that data-driven approaches to measuring and promoting fairness at a single stage of the talent sourcing process can be extended beyond graduate admissions. They said the technologies could be applied to internal product ideation and review, academic proposal reviewing, advertising selection or any setting that involves the collection of recommendations from experts.

We envision these as algorithms and workflows that could be deployed both internally at Google or offered broadly as screening tools throughout GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and other Google products.

Mattei and Dickerson have worked closely together for many years, and the fact that they work at two very different academic institutions one a large public university in a wealthy geographic area and the other a smaller private university in a lower income part of the country will actually be an advantage in their research.

The student application profiles at both schools are very different, and will lead to different concerns and distributions of data Mattei said. We believe this diversity strengthens the results that will arise from the data-driven validation of our model.

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Google awards Tulane professor for work promoting diversity and fairness in AI systems - News from Tulane

Hundreds of prominent executives from high-profile companies, including Amazon, Google, BlackRock and Starbucks, signed a statement that opposes discriminatory legislation that makes voting harder.

The statement, printed Wednesday in an advertisement in the New York Times, was organized by Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier, two of Americas most prominent Black corporate leaders. The statement called democracy a beautifully American ideal and for it to work, we must ensure the right to vote for all of us.

We all should feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any discriminatory legislation on measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot, it continued.

The statement, which is described as nonpartisan, doesnt directly address any specific legislation, notably in Georgia, Texas, and other key states where Republican lawmakers are trying to clamp down on ballot access.

Wednesdays statement was a sign of solidarity after weeks of warring between Republicans and a smaller group of Georgia-based companies that spoke out after public pressure.

Three of those companies, including Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines and Home Depot, declined to add their names, according to the New York Times. All three are based in Georgia and were wary because of the blowback they had received after their earlier statements on voting rights but also did not feel the need to speak again, it reported.

Its the latest high-profile letter from companies in the last month.

A few weeks ago, chief executives and other high-ranking leaders from more than 100 companies including Target, Snapchat and Uber, issued a public statement opposing any measures that deny eligible voters the right to cast ballots. That letter was organized by Civic Alliance, a coalition that recognizes that a strong democracy is good for business, according to its website.

Another letter, released in late March, from Black business executives challenged their fellow corporate leaders to be more forceful in condemning what they describe as deliberate attempts by Republicans to limit the number of Black Americans casting ballots in key states.

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Amazon, Google, GM, Starbucks and hundreds of companies join to oppose voting restrictions | NewsChannel 3-12 - KEYT

Even for Silicon Valley, Surojit Chatterjees rise to extraordinary wealth was lightning fast.

The chief product officer has been with Coinbase, the biggest US crypto exchange, for just 15 months. The former Google executives Coinbase stake was worth about $US180.8 million after its first volatile day of trading in New York on Wednesday (US time). Hes also set to receive share options within the next five years that are currently worth about $US465.5 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Coinbase chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee with CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong.

Chatterjee, who was 46 as of February and oversees product management and design, joins Coinbase founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam as major winners of the firms Nasdaq debut. Together, their stakes are worth more than $US16 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The listing wasnt without drama. Coinbase, listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker COIN, opened at $US381 The price rose to almost $US430 before retreating to close at $US328.28, up 31 per cent from the $US250 reference price set by Nasdaq ahead of the first trade. That puts Coinbases market value at $US85.78 billion.

Its another milestone though in putting crypto further into the mainstream. The company went public as Bitcoin - which together with Ethereum made up most of its 2020 trading volume - is trading around its all-time high. Bitcoin has more than doubled in price this year to about $US64,000.

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Chatterjees Coinbase stake is a dramatic example of the instant equity employees can receive when joining startups. Gone are the days when equity was mainly distributed in tranches over many years, a reward for loyalty as well as performance.

Chatterjee joined Coinbase last February after three years at Alphabets Google, where he led the companys shopping platform during his second stint at the search giant. He previously headed product and delivery for mobile search ads and AdSense before a brief stop at Indian e-commerce site Flipkart. His experience at the Bangalore-based company appealed to Armstrong.

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Google executives 2020 move to Coinbase worth $US646 million - Sydney Morning Herald