Monthly Archives: May 2021

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Take Two

Google seems perennially mired in litigation these days. The latest legal salvo hurled at the tech giant is a $4.16 billion class action lawsuit in the UK alleging that Google illegally tracked 4.4 million iPhone users nearly 10 years ago in England and Wales. Consumer advocate Richard Lloyd, who initiated the suit, claims Google employed a workaround for tracking on Safari between August 2011 and February 2012, which allowed Google to use cookies to track peoples browser activity without their permission. This is not allowed under British data protection laws. Business Insider reports that Google is, of course, attempting to block the suit, claiming that the latest allegations are a decade old and have already been addressed. The class action suit comes after years of legal wrangling and was initially rejected by the UK courts in 2018. But this isnt Googles first rodeo or, shall we say, safari? Google was already forced to pay a $22.5 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 over deploying a tracking workaround on Safari.

Toned Down

The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust is keeping the heat on big tech. But its latest hearing, held on Tuesday, was less combative than other recent hearings and spared the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google another grilling. This round of inquiries zeroed in on the way in which social media companies make money and how that can be problematic. The policy leads at Facebook, Twitter and YouTube answered questions about how their respective platforms use algorithms and how algorithms in general can modify human behavior. Still, the hearing wasnt without its share of political theater. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), chair of the Senate Judiciarys subcommittee on privacy and tech, declared that algorithms are designed to attract our time and attention on social media, and the results can be harmful to our kids attention spans, to the quality of our public discourse, to our public health and even to our democracy itself. Still, this latest hearing demonstrates that bipartisan agreement is possible, which could help buoy the chances of a tech reform bill passing the Senate. Several such bills include changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects social media companies from liability for user-created content. TechCrunch has more.

ATT Worth It

Apple had a record second quarter, with revenue increasing54% YoYto$89.6 billion. But some of the biggest headlines this week had less to do with hardware and more to do with the release of iOS 14.5 on Mondayand the start of AppTrackingTransparency enforcement. Asked during Apple's earnings call on Wednesday evening what the response has been from developers, CEO Tim Cook replied in his usual fashion that the focus is on user choice. Cook said thatfeedback from users before and after ATTwent livehas been tremendous and that Apple is proud of its full implementation. We're really standing up on behalf of the consumer here, Cook said. But Cook declined to get specific when asked about opt-in rates for the ATT prompt. "Frankly, even if it's a very low [number] of people that don't want to be tracked," he said, "it's worth doing because those people should make their own mind up, whether they would like to be tracked or not. [Related in AdExchanger:"IOS 14.5 Is Live, ATT Enforcement Begins And Heres How We Got Here"]

Post-Cookie Context

Third-party cookies are out. First-party data is in and ad tech companies are ramping up their offerings to stay ahead of the curve. Among them is Criteo, which rolled out a new product that connects first-party commerce data with real-time contextual signals so that marketers can drive and measure incremental revenue in a post-cookie world. Read the release. Criteo has been working to reduce its exposure to the end of third-party cookies. Although retargeting is, and will continue to be, core to its business, Criteos top priority is to build targeting products that serve its growing base of ecommerce and retail media customers. The new contextual targeting tool is one of the solutions that Criteo has been developing for its commerce media platform, including beefing up its first-party data assets. [Related in AdExchanger: Commerce Is Criteos Eject Button For The Third-Party Cookie Problem]

But Wait, Theres More!

Bell, Canadas largest communications company, has teamed up with Xandr to create Canadas first self-serve advertising platform for TV and digital. [release]

Looks like the holdcos are turning a corner after being pummelled by the pandemic: IPG and WPP both reported a return to organic revenue growth in Q1 2021. [WSJ]

Heres how the top 100 highest-grossing games are displaying iOS 14.5 ATT prompts. [LinkedIn]

Video advertising and monetization provider Aniview has extended its CTV and OTT services to additional on-demand formats. [release]

Google is adding COVID-related information to searches for travel to help people figure out whether quarantine or proof of vaccination is required at their destination. [The Verge]

SpotX has integrated with TVSquared as a preferred measurement and attribution partner for CTV. [release]

Spotify is following Apple with an ad-free podcast subscription service. [The Drum]

Youre Hired!

DoubleVerify has tapped Google veteran James Cashmore as SVP of global client and agency partnerships. [release]

Edelman has hired Karima Zmerli as global head of performance and predictive intelligence. [CampaignUS]

ID5 has appointed Joseph Quaglia as VP of sales and business development. [release]

More:

Google Hit With Suit In The UK Over Illegal Tracking; Lawmakers Dig In On Algorithms - AdExchanger

achinthamb/Shutterstock.com

Third-party cookies are going extinct, but that doesnt mean tracking is going away. Google is introducing a new tracking method called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, as part of the privacy sandbox initiative it announced in 2019. Google claims its replacement for cookies will better protect user data, but many people remain unconvinced.

With tracking cookies on the declinepartially due to many browsers blocking third-party cookies by defaultGoogle wants to come up with another way to track user data for targeted ads. Thats where FLoC comes in.

FLoC lets advertisers use behavioral targeting without cookies. It runs in Googles Chrome browser and tracks a users online behavior.

Then, it assigns that browser history an identifier and adds it to a group of other browsers with similar behaviors called a cohort. Supposedly, advertisers would be able to see the behaviors that people in a cohort share without being able to identify individuals within that cohort, because each persons browser is given an anonymized ID.

Users cohort IDs would be recalculated on a weekly basis, providing a new summary of their online behavior every week. Google claims that since there would be thousands of people in each cohort, no single person could be picked out of the group and paired with their unique browsing data.

Google says that FLoC will allow personalized ads without the collection of data that can be tied to specific people using its products. By assigning each browser an anonymized ID and then adding that ID into a large group where only the overall patterns are accessible to advertisers, the idea is that your privacy will remain intact while advertisers still get your eyeballs.

If their proof of concept test is anything to go by, FLoC will use an algorithm called SimHash to create user IDs and assign people to cohorts. SimHash was originally created for use by Google web crawlers to find nearly identical web pages.

Since this happens on your computer, your data wouldnt get stored on a server, which is one of the privacy concerns associated with third-party cookies. Massive amounts of user data that could be paired to individual people were harvested and then stored under unclear security protocols for an indeterminate length of time.

Google also claims that cohorts with highly sensitive content wont be used. If someone frequently visits a medical website or a site that routinely publishes religious or political content, that information wont be used to add them to a cohort and will remain private.

According to a statement published by Marshall Vale, the product manager of Googles privacy sandbox:

Before a cohort becomes eligible, Chrome analyzes it to see if the cohort is visiting pages with sensitive topics, such as medical websites or websites with political or religious content, at a high rate. If so, Chrome ensures that the cohort isnt used, without learning which sensitive topics users were interested in.

While it may seem benign on the surface, many are speaking out against FLoC. In a post entitled Googles FLoC Is a Terrible Idea, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that Google is using a false dichotomy when it comes to privacy.

Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads, writes the articles author Bennett Cyphers. He argues that our options shouldnt be reduced to You either have old tracking or new trackingthere just shouldnt be tracking, period.

And others appear to agree. Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, has said that it wont adopt FLoC, although it is looking into other advertising options that preserve privacy. Browsers that have branched from Chrome, like Brave and Vivaldi, arent going to implement it. Apple has also said that it wont use it in its Safari browser. As of April 2021, Microsoft has disabled the feature in Microsoft Edge, its Chromium-derived browser.

Cyphers writes that although FLoC can keep users semi-anonymous, it creates new privacy concerns by trying to address old ones while still keeping targeted ads. One of those concerns is fingerprinting.

Browser fingerprinting is the ability to take separate pieces of information from someones browser and construct them into a reliable identifier for a specific person. The more unique your browsing behavior, the easier you are to fingerprint because that behavior sets you apart from the group.

Since FLoC takes your browsing behavior and uses it to create an identifier before assigning you to a group, Cyphers argues that whoever wants to track you already has a lot of the work done for them. Someone trying to track a pre-FLoC Chrome user would have to pick them from a pool of millionsa cohort is only a few thousand.

In order to work for advertisers, FLoC has to share your cohort data. Sometimes, it will share that data with companies that can already identify you from, say, your login information.

If youve logged in to a site with Google to use a service, for example, information like your name and login credentials will already be saved. That information can be used to tie your cohort ID, which is supposed to be anonymous, to your user profile.

Cyphers argues that this sort of cross-contextual information may actually help illicit trackers be more effective. He also says that it just doesnt make sense for every site you visit to know everything about you on first contact:

You should have a right to present different aspects of your identity in different contexts. If you visit a site for medical informationtheres no reason it needs to know what your politics are.

Google is already running a trial of FLoC on about 0.5% of users in regions that include Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. You can check to see whether youre one of those users at the EFFs site Am I FLoCed?

Read the original post:

What Is Googles FLoC, and How Will It Track You Online? - How-To Geek

Bob O'Donnell, Special to USA TODAY Published 9:00 a.m. ET April 26, 2021 | Updated 1:55 p.m. ET April 26, 2021

iRobot is usually known for their Roomba robot vacuums, but they make coding toys for kids too Reviewed

As glimmers of hope driven by increased vaccinations and an improving economic environment get people thinking more about their future, many are in the process of evaluating their current work situations. In fact, recent studies suggest that the pandemic has driven more people to contemplate job changes than has been witnessed in a long time.

One seemingly obvious target for many people is a job in the tech industry. After all, tech companies not only survived but thrived in the pandemic and most people realize that our reliance on tech-related products and services (and the companies that supply them) are only going to grow over time.

Plus, the tech industry is generally known for offering more attractive wages and benefits than many other industries.

The problem, however, is that breaking into the tech industry has traditionally been seen as difficult to do particularly if you dont have a 4-year college degree. Thankfully, the situation is starting to change in a dramatic fashion.

Many of the latest efforts are driven in part by the reality that there simply arent enough people with the right skills and/or experience to fill all the jobs the tech industry currently has, much less the jobs it will continue to create.

Job openings: There is a surge in new job openings, but why isn't there a surge in job candidates?

After being laid off, my job was posted: Does my company have to rehire me?

Theres widespread recognition that many groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and women of all races, are woefully underrepresented in tech, leading to a wide range of product, strategy, personnel, and perspective issues that have started to come to the fore.

Many big tech companies have been aware of these concerns for some time (see "New job search: Tech companies tackle shifting jobs environment with reskilling efforts for more). However, new programs designed to take people from all types of ethnic, socioeconomic and educational backgrounds and provide them with the skills and opportunities they need to succeed in the tech world are growing at a rapid pace.

As part of its Upskilling 2025 initiative, for example, Amazon has launched a new program inside its Amazon Technical Academy thats specifically designed to take people without any technical background or training and turn them into software engineers in ninemonths. The only requirement is a high school diploma or GED, though the program is also open to those with a college degree in other unrelated areas.

Given that the industrywide median annual salary for software developers as of 2019 was $107,510, thats bound to be an attractive option to many especially because of the 98% success rate that previous programs at the Amazon Technical Academy have achieved in placing graduates into jobs.

(Photo: Getty Images)

The full-time virtual program and its curriculum were developed by Amazon engineers and is open both to people who work at Amazon as well as those outside the company, thanks to a partnership Amazon formed with two schools, Kenzie Academy and Lambda School.

For Amazon employees, there is no tuition, and the company even provides a stipend for living costs and a subsidy for health benefits. This helps avoid the financial burden of having to be without a paycheck during the ninemonths of training.

Kenzie Academys tuition is $20,000, though there are scholarships and flexible payment plans available. In the case of Lambda, the school uses an increasingly common approach of not charging for tuition upfront, but then taking a portion of a graduates earnings (something called an Income Share Agreement) until the tuition is paid, but not until the student gets a software engineering job. Again, this removes the critical financial burden, which might prevent people from lower-income households from even considering these programs.

At IBM, the company has created a free online training program, open to anyone, called SkillsBuild. It offers a variety of different online classes many of which are powered by the companys Watson AI technology.

The SkillsBuild program is targeted both at individuals and nonprofits that want to provide tech skill-focused training classes for their members. The program has an online assessment tool that can provide guidance on the types of courses to take, as well as the types of opportunities to pursue. In addition, theres an online job board thats matched up to the classes being taught and the badges you earn as you take them.

Google also offers online skill building tools called Career Certificates that are specifically designed to build the skills required for a variety of different entry level IT (Information Technology) jobs positions that have an average starting salary of $63,600. Most of Googles courses are taught through Coursera, which charges $39/month to access them.

As Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently wrote in a blog about the program, however, the company is in the process of offering 100,000 scholarships for the Career Certificates through nonprofits, workforce development boards, and other organizations that are specifically targeting underrepresented groups.

Many other big tech companies also have training programs that are designed to open the tech industrys previously closed doors to a wider range of people, including Ciscos Networking Academy and Microsofts Global Skills Initiative, which was recently extended to offer free online tech skill certification programs through the end of 2021.

While the pandemics toll has been horrific, one positive outcome beginning to appear is the opportunity for people to make a change and get a fresh start on their careers. Given the huge demand and wide range of financially rewarding opportunities in the tech field, there's never been a better time to take a look at these types of programs and see if you can find a match for your interests and goals. This is particularly true if youre part of a community that hasnt typically been able to enjoy the tech industrys successes.

There is no question that tech-related job skills have become important, so its great to see so many of the tech industrys largest companies doing their part to extend the pool of potential workers. If youre ready for a job change, it looks like now is a very good time.

USA TODAY columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. His clients are major technology firms including Microsoft, HP, Dell, Samsung and Intel. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2021/04/26/amazon-google-and-more-offer-training-programs-newcomers/7335646002/

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Looking to level up? Amazon, Google, Microsoft and more offer training programs - USA TODAY

Our search histories are our secret shame. From ridiculous medical emergencies to tutorials on how one could kill a person - Google and its brethren know us better than almost anybody else. This data, when collated, can present some rather disturbing trends hinting at, among other things, rising domestic violence, suicide, and femicide amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But there is more to it than what meets the eye.

Earlier this year, a study published in the Journal of General Psychology contended that if Google searches were any indication, domestic violence and attacks against women had increased manifold as the pandemic raged. The study by the deputy director of New Zealand's University of Otago had tracked Google searches in the US to come to its conclusion. Reportedly, the study contends that the phrases "How to control your woman" and how to hit a woman so no one knows" were each googled 165 million times. Similarly problematic phrases such as "Help me, he wont leave" was allegedly Googled over 1.2 billion times.

While the National Commission for Women in India had said something much along the same lines in 2020, the study does not hold up when one checks Google Trends. Indeed a quick perusal of the trends for the problematic phrases mentioned in Katerina Standish's study show no fluctuations. Some are uncommon enough that Google had no available trends for it. We conducted the Trends search for both the US and worldwide, seeing no major fluctuations of changes.

Published online in January this year, the study had drawn widespread news coverage in many foreign media platforms. But as the scrutiny grew, along came the fact checks. More recently, the story has been picked up by Indian media platforms, triggering fresh outrage. A Twitter handle, believed to be Standish's own has also also clarified that her methodology was "flawed".

The rest is here:

The flaw in trying to 'control your woman' on Google search - Free Press Journal