Google plans to introduce generative artificial intelligence into its advertising business over the coming months, as Big Tech groups rush to incorporate the groundbreaking technology into their products. From a report: According to an internal presentation to advertisers seen by the Financial Times, the Alphabet-owned company intends to begin using the AI to create novel advertisements based on materials produced by human marketers. "Generative AI is unlocking a world of creativity," the company said in the presentation, titled "AI-powered ads 2023." Google already uses AI in its advertising business to create simple prompts that encourage users to buy products. However, the integration of its latest generative AI, which also powers its Bard chatbot, means it will be able to produce far more sophisticated campaigns resembling those created by marketing agencies.

According to the presentation, advertisers can supply "creative" content such as imagery, video, and text relating to a particular campaign. The AI will then "remix" this material to generate ads based on the audience it aims to reach, as well as other goals such as sales targets. One person familiar with Google's presentation said they were worried the tool could spread misinformation, because text produced by AI chatbots can confidently state falsehoods. "It is optimized to convert new customers and has no idea what the truth is," the person said. Google told the FT it planned to put firm guardrails in place to prevent such errors, known as "hallucinations," when it rolls out its new generative AI features in the coming months.

Microsoft is heading further down the path of advertising its own services in Windows 11, with different ads now popping up in the Start menu. From a report: To be precise, this is Windows 11 preview build 23435, which was just released to the Dev channel. As Microsoft puts it: "We are continuing the exploration of badging on the Start menu with several new treatments for users logging in with local user accounts to highlight the benefits of signing in with a Microsoft account (MSA)." So, the translation of this is that 'badging' is essentially advertising ('badgering' would perhaps be more accurate), and it's something we've recently seen with Windows 11 urging users to perform a cloud backup (in OneDrive).

In this new preview build, the prodding stick is being employed to nudge those who haven't enlisted for a Microsoft Account (who remain using a local account) into signing up for an MSA. Compared to the previous cloud backup prompt on the Start menu, it's even clearer that this is advertising because it's fully selling the benefits of having a Microsoft account. For example, Microsoft tells you how hooking your Windows 11 installation into an MSA will ensure that your PC is kept backed up and more secure, or that it'll keep your settings synced across multiple devices.

Online tax-filing services from TurboTax and H&R Block "want to blab your tax return secrets," warns the Washington Post. "Why? To help them make more money." If you prepare your taxes online with TurboTax or H&R Block software, at some point you'll see a message that I found confusing. "We can help you do more," TurboTax says. In this case, that "help" is funneling the private information from your tax return to Intuit — the company that owns TurboTax, Credit Karma and accounting software QuickBooks. H&R Block offers to "personalize your H&R Block experience."

If you say yes, you're going to see email and other marketing from Intuit and H&R Block or its business partners that are tailored to what's in your tax return.

That might include how much money you make, how much you owe in student loans, the size of your tax return and your charitable contributions. For example, a credit card company might pay Intuit's Credit Karma to show offers to high-income people. Intuit knows that information from your tax return. The Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler wrote last year about how these two companies grab for your secret tax return information. He dubbed it "the Facebook-ization of personal finance."

In a way, the tax prep companies are more aggressive than Facebook. What they're doing is mission creep. You might already be paying TurboTax and H&R Block to prepare or file your tax return. Now they also want your permission to pass along your secrets to make even more money off you.

The French Competition Authority is likely to move forward soon with an antitrust investigation into Apple over complaints tied to 2021 changes to its app tracking policies, Axios reported, citing sources. From the report: A formal investigation would mark the first major government move taken globally against Apple related to privacy rule changes that upended the digital advertising world. French regulators are favoring issuing a formal "Statement of Objections" to parties involved in the matter in coming weeks, sources told Axios.

That step would signal to groups that issued initial complaints about Apple's actions and Apple that the authority found evidence of illegal anticompetitive behavior in its initial review of the complaints it received. The 2020 complaint argues that Apple's app tracking changes did not adequately adhere to European Union privacy rules and that Apple failed to hold itself to the same ad targeting standards that it forced on its competitors because it targeted iOS users with ads from app tracking data. The complaint was filed jointly by four French advertising trade groups -- IAB France, Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), SRI and UDECAM.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved a final consent order in its first-ever enforcement action over a case involving "review hijacking," or when a marketer steals consumer reviews of another product to boost the sales of its own. TechCrunch reports: In this case, the FTC has ordered supplements retailer The Bountiful Company, the maker of Nature's Bounty vitamins and other brands, to pay $600,000 for deceiving customers on Amazon where it used a feature to merge the reviews of different products to make some appear to have better ratings and reviews than they otherwise would have had if marketed under their own listings. The case exposes how sellers have been exploiting an Amazon feature that allows sellers to request the creation of "variation" relationships between different products and SKUs. The feature is meant to help marketers and consumers alike as it creates a single detail page on Amazon.com that shows similar products that are different only in narrow, specific ways, the FTC explains -- like items that come in a different color, size, quantity or flavor. For instance, a t-shirt may have a dozen SKUs associated with one another because the shirt comes in a wide variety of colors.

For shoppers, it's helpful to see all the options on one page so you can pick the item that best matches your needs and budget. In the case of supplements, the feature could be used to combine the same products by merging various SKUs featuring different quantities of the item in question, like bottles with 50, 100 or 200 pills, for example. However, The Bountiful Company exploited Amazon's feature to merge its newer products with older, well-established products which had different formulations, the FTC said. The FTC cited and screenshotted more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its original complaint (PDF) against the vitamin and supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its core brands -- including Nature's Bounty and Sundown -- to Nestle. As a result of these product merges, consumers who happened across any of the newer products would believe them to be better received than they were in reality, as they were benefiting from the merged ratings and reviews of other, differentiated items.

"Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising," Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said this February when the consent order was first announced ahead of its public comment period and finalized version. With today's decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers. It's also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and barred from using "deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services," the FTC said in a unanimous 4-0 decision.

Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech. From a report: The company, which began full-scale AI research in 2013, stands out along with Google in the number of studies published. "We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, told Nikkei in an exclusive interview on Wednesday in Tokyo. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people." Meta announced in February that it would establish a new organization to develop generative AI, but this is the first time it has indicated a timeline for commercialization. The technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has already been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI of the U.S. But Bosworth insists Meta remains on the technology's cutting edge.

"We feel very confident that ... we are at the very forefront," he said. "Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams. "[I] expect we'll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It's probably the area that I'm spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox." Bosworth believes Meta's artificial intelligence can improve an ad's effectiveness partly by telling the advertiser what tools to use in making it. He said that instead of a company using a single image in an advertising campaign, it can "ask the AI, 'Make images for my company that work for different audiences.' And it can save a lot of time and money."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For years, online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest were sharing with advertisers the personal information and health data of their patients without their consent. Monument, which acquired Tempest in 2022, confirmed the extensive years-long leak of patients' information in a data breach notification filed with California's attorney general last week, blaming their use of third-party tracking systems developed by ad giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Pinterest. When reached for comment, Monument CEO Mike Russell confirmed more than 100,000 patients are affected.

In its disclosure, the companies confirmed their use of website trackers, which are small snippets of code that share with tech giants information about visitors to their websites, and often used for analytics and advertising. The data shared with advertisers includes patient names, dates of birth, email and postal addresses, phone numbers and membership numbers associated with the companies and patients' insurance provider. The data also included the person's photo, unique digital ID, which services or plan the patient is using, appointment information and assessment and survey responses submitted by the patient, which includes detailed responses about a person's alcohol consumption and used to determine their course of treatment.

Monument's own website says these survey answers are "protected" and "used only" by its care team. Monument confirmed that it shared patients' sensitive data with advertisers since January 2020, and Tempest since November 2017. Both companies say they have removed the tracking code from their websites. But the tech giants are not obligated to delete the data that Monument and Tempest shared with them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is "exploring" putting ads in the responses given by Bing Chat, its new search agent powered by OpenAI's GPT-4. Microsoft confirmed this is happening, albeit in an experimental form, in a blog post published today. Here's the relevant bit from the very end after "a bit of context" explaining no one should be surprised: "We are also exploring additional capabilities for publishers including our more than 7,500 Microsoft Start partner brands. We recently met with some of our partners to begin exploring ideas and to get feedback on how we can continue to distribute content in a way that is meaningful in traffic and revenue for our partners.

As we look to continue to evolve the model together, we shared some early ideas we're exploring including:

- An expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage and driving more traffic to the publisher's website.
- For our Microsoft Start partners, placing a rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content beside the chat answer helping to drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start where we share the ad revenue with the partner. We're also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response."

After launching My Ad Center last fall, Google is now introducing the Ads Transparency Center as a "searchable hub of all ads served from verified advertisers." 9to5Google reports: The Ads Transparency Center will let you view all the advertisements a company has run using Google's networks. Each ad includes the date it last ran, format (text, video, etc.), and what region (country) it was shown in: "For example, imagine you're seeing an ad for a skincare product you're interested in, but you don't recognize the brand, or you're curious to understand if you recognize other ads from this brand. With the Ads Transparency Center, you can look up the advertiser and learn more about them before purchasing or visiting their site."

You can search by advertiser (with approximate ad quantity noted) or website, with filters for topics, time, and country. Once an advertiser is selected, Google will show the feed of ads with the ability to select for more details. You'll be able to access it directly here or from the My Ad Center, which lets you customize advertising that appears in Search, Discover, Shopping, and YouTube.

Toronto-based Feroot Security "found that so-called tracking pixels from the TikTok parent company were present in 30 U.S. state-government websites across 27 states," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including some where the app has been banned from state networks and devices." The review was performed in January and February. The presence of that code means that U.S. state governments around the country are inadvertently participating in a data-collection effort for a foreign-owned company, one that senior Biden administration officials and lawmakers of both parties have said could be harmful to U.S. national security and the privacy of Americans.

Administrators who manage government websites use such pixels to help measure the effectiveness of advertising they have purchased on TikTok.... The presence of the TikTok tracking code on government websites underlines the challenge for those who deem the China-owned app a potential data-security threat. Lawmakers in both parties are considering a nationwide ban, but simply uprooting the app from U.S. smartphones wouldn't stop all data-tracking activities....

Feroot found that the average website it studied had more than 13 embedded pixels. Google's were far and away the most common, with 92% of websites examined having some sort of Google tracking pixel embedded. About 50% of the websites the firm examined had Microsoft Corp. or Facebook pixels. TikTok had a presence in less than 10% of sites examined.

Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units.

"Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?

Amazon is cutting another 9,000 jobs, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote to employees in a memo on Monday. The move, which impacts roles in AWS, PXT, Advertising and Twitch, comes weeks after the e-commerce group said it would eliminate 18,000 jobs. Jassy: As part of our annual planning process, leaders across the company work with their teams to decide what investments they want to make for the future, prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole.

Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications." The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...."

The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the following you would most like to know more about." The survey went on to list topics such as privacy, syncing passwords across devices, and shopping features.... Users were asked to rate the importance of features including text to speech, extensions, the availability to sync data across desktop and mobile devices, and — notably — blocking third party cookies.

Amazon seems to be seriously considering a web browser of its own, and it comes at a time when it would have an unusual impact on the advertising business. The ad industry is bracing for cataclysmic change as Google moves closer to killing third-party cookies in Chrome, the world's most popular web browser, which would kneecap one of the primary ways businesses track consumers for ads.... Part of what makes Amazon so attractive to marketers is the fact that the company sits on a treasure trove of data about what consumers are buying and what their shopping habits are like. If Amazon could match that information with the data collection that comes from a web browser, it could tip the scales of internet advertising in favor of the retail giant.
One thing Amazon asked users is whethered they'd be convinced to download and try a browser if it offered "AI-enabled tab, history, and bookmarks management to automatically sort these into categories for quick search and retrieval."

The Brazilian government is studying whether to regulate Internet platforms with content that earns revenue such as advertising, its secretary for digital policies, Joao Brant, said on Friday. Reuters reports: The idea would be for a regulator to hold such platforms, not consumers, accountable for monetized content, Brant told Reuters. Another goal is "to prevent the networks from being used for the dissemination and promotion of crimes and illegal content" especially after the riots by supporters of former far-right President JairBolsonaro in Brasilia in January, fueled by misinformation about the election he lost in October.

Brant said President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government also intends to make companies responsible for stopping misinformation, hate speech and other crimes on their social media platforms. Platforms would not be held responsible for content individually, but for how diligent they are in protecting the "digital environment," he said in an interview. Brant did not detail what the regulatory body would look like, but said the government wants to regulate monetized content and prevent the platforms from spreading misinformation.

Meta on Friday launched its subscription service in the U.S., which would allow Facebook and Instagram users pay for verification in the same vein as Elon Musk-owned Twitter. From a report: The Meta Verified service will give users a blue badge after they verify their accounts using a government ID and will cost $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 a month on Apple's iOS system and Google-owned Android, Meta said in a statement. The service, which Meta said it was testing in February, follows in the footsteps of Snapchat as well as messaging app Telegram and marks the latest effort by a social media company to diversify its revenue away from advertising.

A Dutch court hearing a class action lawsuit on Wednesday found that a European subsidiary of Meta, Facebook Ireland, improperly used personal data of Dutch citizens between 2010 and 2020, saying the company had "violated the law." From a report: "Personal information was processed for the purposes of advertising when in this case that is not allowed," a summary of the Amsterdam court ruling said. "Personal information was given to third parties without Facebook users being informed and without there being a legal basis to do so." The decision was directed at Facebook Ireland because it is the part of the company that oversees the processing of Dutch user data. The case has not yet progressed to the phase where any damages could be claimed.

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API.

"For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users."

[...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Saturday that it would end availability of news content for Canadians on its platforms if the country's Online News Act passes in its current form. From a report: The "Online News Act," or House of Commons bill C-18, introduced in April last year laid out rules to force platforms like Meta and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content. "A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable," a Meta spokesperson said as reason to suspend news access in the country. Meta's move comes after Google last month started testing limited news censorship as a potential response to the bill. Canada's news media industry has asked the government for more regulation of tech companies to allow the industry to recoup financial losses it has suffered in the years as tech giants like Google and Meta steadily gain greater market share of advertising. We've watched this movie before.

"Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible," confesses a staff writer for the Atlantic. "But I don't know what it was." Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

"It does start to drive you mad," says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site's AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, "you get a green dollar sign when it's monetizable, and it goes yellow if it's not." Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time — and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it's better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say....

YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.... Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines...political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms. Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though "educational" references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review....

[T]alk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey. ["They don't tell me if it's Nazis, heroin, or anything," Gold says later. "You're just left wondering what it was."]
The article notes that YouTube's algorithm seems to flag people who are debunking misinformation as misinformation. (One study found that purveyors of controversial content simply stop worrying about YouTube demonetizing their videos, using them to direct viewers instead to their "affiliate" links offering commissions, or to their content on other still-monetized platforms.)

In just the last three months of 2022, YouTube made almost $8 billion in advertising revenue, the article concludes. "There's a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel — even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle."

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. Wired reports: While the practice of buying people's location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government's ability to warrantlessly track Americans' phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. The disclosure came [Wednesday] during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation's intelligence chiefs.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau's use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: "Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?" Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising," Wray said. "I understand that we previously -- as in the past -- purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that's not been active for some time." He added that the bureau now relies on a "court-authorized process" to obtain location data from companies."

It's not immediately clear whether Wray was referring to a warrant -- that is, an order signed by a judge who is reasonably convinced that a crime has occurred -- or another legal device. Nor did Wray indicate what motivated the FBI to end the practice. In its landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the Supreme Court held that government agencies accessing historical location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. But the ruling was narrowly construed. Privacy advocates say the decision left open a glaring loophole that allows the government to simply purchase whatever it cannot otherwise legally obtain. [...] Asked during the Senate hearing whether the FBI would pick up the practice of purchasing location data again, Wray replied: "We have no plans to change that, at the current time."