Cambridge Analytica

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 […]