Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” – The Marginalian
An ode to an ode. Both of them beautiful.
Link tags: europe
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Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? – The Markup
I really hope that Betteridge’s Law doesn’t apply to this headline.
Google, Facebook hiding behind skirts of small business
While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.
But tracking is an unnecessary evil.
Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.
Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.
Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.
I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful. - Irish Council for Civil Liberties
Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.
How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News
The coming GDPR storm:
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.
(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)
Notes From An Emergency
But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.
Caroline Lucas MEP » Blog Archive » Green MEP Joins Forces With Music Legend To Protest ‘Corporate Bully’ Copyright Proposals In Euro-Parliament
My representative in the European Parliament is full of WIN!
A Hack for Europe! (plasticbag.org)
Registration for Hack Day Europe (June 16th-17th) is open. Sign up now! This is going to be a lot of fun.