Big Internet Slowing Down Netflix, YouTube – Spotlight #267
News

Good Monday morning. It’s September 10th. Rosh Hashanah started last night, and Islamic New Year starts tomorrow night. We wish the best to everyone celebrating.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 3 minutes to read.

Highlights

  • Major internet providers (telecoms) were accused of slowing traffic from YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and NBC Sports. Bloomberg has details–and you can ask my family about Amazon Prime on Fios.
  • Twitter will mirror Facebook’s political advertising rules. Social advocacy ads are also required to have much more disclosure beginning September 30.\

Facebook Usage Slipping

Still a powerhouse of the global Internet, Facebook usage seems to be declining among U.S. adults.

  • Pew Research says 74% of U.S. users adjusted their privacy setting, took a break from checking the service, or deleted the app from their phone. Read the report.
  • Shaun Dakin surveyed his George Mason marketing students as he does every semester. Half of them said Instagram is the first app they open each day. Not one chose Facebook. Other responses: YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Spotify, Gmail.
  • Facebook and Google apps now account for 54% of all mobile device screen time. Remember that Facebook owns Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp while Google’s Gmail and YouTube are top 10 apps. Here’s a pretty infographic from Visual Capitalist showing the data.

Amazon Takes on Advertising

Facebook and Google are splitting up 60% of the $88 billion U.S. digital ad market. Amazon has a little more than $2 billion of that market, but says it’s ready to challenge the current duopoly.

  • Movie information site IMDb will be the home of a new broadcast-like TV service. That’s one of the ways Amazon will grow ad revenues.
  • Amazon already knows when shoppers buy and how they search for products on the site. Google paid MasterCard millions for that information and may not have an ongoing data feed.
  • Big bets in health care and grocery retail have prepped Amazon to understand how to enter new industries at scale. Their mantra remains Get Big Fast.
  • Why it will work: Bezos’ executive team shares his passion for the long game. With their control of e-commerce and billions of dollars in profitable hosting services, the financial community continues to let Amazon disrupt industries. That’s why few complained about the big acquisitions in retail, logistics (20,000 vans!), and health.

Spotlighted

 

  • Google has a new search engine for data sets. Looking for the databases to do your own research? Search for them here.
  • Google also banned third-party technical support ads from unverified companies. The program is only starting now, but will soon make it harder for scammers to advertise.
  • Instagram is reportedly working on a shopping-specific app.

 

Thanks for starting your week with Spotlight. Have a great week, joy-filled holidays, and send this to a friend or colleague so they can subscribe too.

News

Good Monday morning. It’s August 27th. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will appear before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence one week from Wednesday. Google is still negotiating with the SSCI after Senator Richard Burr rejected Google SVP Kent Walker as a witness. The move comes after all three platforms announced that they had found evidence of disinformation campaigns in the upcoming midterm elections by Russian, Iranian, and other foreign entities.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.

Highlights

    • There was lots of commentary about net neutrality after Verizon shut data access to firefighters in California. The company is in a no-win situation and quickly ensured that first responders in Hawaii were not subject to data caps as they deal with catastrophic flooding.
    • Security and privacy is also making big news at Facebook and government offices.
    • The Australian government is banning Huawei from working on its 5G network. The U.S. government continues to warn consumer about Huawei and ZTE equipment and Kaspersky antivirus protection.

Questions or comments as you read this week’s Spotlight? 
Click the green button below & write George.

Stormy Times for Security & Privacy

The week was marked by a flurry of announcements related to consumer privacy and security. The biggest announcements came from Facebook. The company announced that it was suspending more than 400 applications. The reasons for the suspensions were only given as concerns about the people who created them or the information that they shared.

One app, called myPersonality, was banned for refusing to comply with a Facebook audit and because Facebook says “it is clear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place.” As many as four million people worldwide shared information with the app.

Facebook seems to be working hard on third party acquisition and use of consumer data. We know that the company is eliminating more than 5,000 targeting methods for advertisers because we continue to receive multiple messages about those changes. You may have even heard about this on the news.

What you probably don’t know yet is that Facebook is not disclosing what targeting methods are being discontinued unless you are an advertiser currently using one of them. We’ve seen correspondence from Facebook ad reps who say that they don’t have a list of the categories to share. And they seem frustrated by that as well.

Remember that advertisers can be adept at approximating behaviors they are targeting. Someone who posts about Passover, for example, is significantly more likely to be Jewish. Someone who posts about multiple Jewish, Christian, or other holidays is likely to be a member of the religion or culture that celebrates those holidays. Remember that these also help you ensure that see ads that are at least somewhat relevant to you. And yes, they can be used by advertisers to break discrimination and other regulations and laws.

One of the steps Facebook is taking in its quest to rid the site of disinformation is assigning a secret rating of each user’s trustworthiness according to a Washington Post report. There are few details about the program, which is said to monitor whether someone often shares information from non-credible sources.

This will potentially limit the exposure of that one person we all know who is a source for those “Bill Gates is giving everyone in America $500” stories (He’s not)

Other Privacy News

Password is not a good word to use as your password. Neither is 123456.

What about combining then?

A security audit by the Western Australian Auditor General examined about a quarter-million passwords and found 26% of Australian government accounts had weak passwords.

The combo Password123 we described above was found on 1,464 active government accounts. Other favorites were Project10 and October2017. There were even 47 accounts using variants of good ole’ qwerty.

Of the weak passwords, 21% had variants of a date or season name and another 11% used a variant of 123. Pro tip: Using the string 321 instead of 123 doesn’t even secure your password from your kid.

You can read the report in PDF here. The bottom line is that hackers don’t want your password fo find your credit card or other personal info. If you’re a target because you work in a government office, they want access to the network using your password. And you don’t want your name on their attack.

If you’re a target because you are known to do sensitive work, there is little you can personally do beyond following the security protocols you’re given. Even those aren’t enough. Researchers last week presented findings that show ultrasonic sounds generated by your computer monitor can be used to determine what’s on your screen even when the screen isn’t visible or if you’re on a video call.

An amazing quote from the story in Wired, “One day I happened to be browsing a particularly boring legal agreement with many lines of proverbial small print,” [security researcher Eran] Tromer says. “It was too small, so I zoomed in, and then I realized that something in the ambient noise in the room changed. So I zoomed back out and the sound changed back. After awhile I realized that something about the periodicity of the image was affecting the periodicity of the signal.”

Spotlighted

Add Target to the list of retailers coming for Amazon. The chain announced last week that same-day delivery is now available at 1,100 stores and drive-up pickups are available at another 1,000.

We told you several months ago about a new service called NewsGuard. A free Google Chrome browser extension is their first consumer product. The company will show a red or green symbol for thousands of different information sites regarding their trustworthiness. You can download the extension at Google’s Chrome Web Store.

We’re off next week for Labor Day. Spotlight returns Monday, September 10th. Have a wonderful holiday weekend, and keep writing. Your comments and feedback make this a great experience.

Facebook’s Psychological Trick Memo Explained
News

Good morning. It’s Monday, August 20th. This is Spotlight #265. The VMAs are tonight so you’ll have an opportunity to hear music on MTV, the Academy of Country Music has its awards on Wednesday, and college football returns Saturday.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 3 minutes to read.

Highlights

    • A memo written by an executive whose company was purchased by Facebook was leaked this week. The document  revealed “a psychological trick” to build up high school user interest. We’ll unpack it below.
    • Brazil, the fourth largest Internet market in the world, has passed a tough new data protection law. Enforcement begins in 18 months, shortly before California’s data protection law takes effect.
    • Google said six months ago that its Verily health care subsidiary could detect heart disease by analyzing a person’s eyes. Now comes news that its DeepMind AI outperforms doctors in diagnosing more than 50 eye diseases and conditions.

“We eventually identified a psychological trick”

A good number of attorneys receive Spotlight each week. Would one of you please tell the folks at Facebook what to put in writing and what to skip?

Facebook bought tbh, an “anonymous” social media app focused on high school students, last September. The well-funded company had launched only one month earlier. Their app collected anonymous compliments by allowing users to select one of four classmates to receive an accolade.

“It’s like your high school senior superlatives writ large and in real time,” we wrote then.

Students could only vote on people in their school and had to create an account with a real name. There were many human moderators, and the app’s usage exploded among high schoolers, reaching 2 million active users in only a couple of weeks. That prompted Facebook to swoop in and buy the company before there was time to even launch an Android version.  And then Facebook killed off the app within a few months.

But where they messed up was allowing tbh’s founders to write about how the company accessed users’ Instagram accounts, made people curious, and targeted users in the high school with cryptic messages set to go off on students’ phones as classes dismissed for the day.

The strategy was pure guerilla marketing. Even the memo’s authors, the company’s founders, wrote that their idea wasn’t scalable. For now, their identities remain secret, and Facebook won’t comment on the story, which was scooped by BuzzFeed News.

Our take is that the trick–a simple example of cryptic messaging that stoked interest–was creative but oversold with the “psychological trick” description. All of marketing, including sales, is psychological. But the move hurts Facebook’s reputation among people who didn’t do what you did in learning about the issue. See, psychological trick.

The BuzzFeed story, including the complete memo, is here.

And Facebook had some good news. You’ve probably seen birthday announcements on Facebook that feature your acquaintances and friends asking you to donate to a charity to celebrate their birthday.

In the program’s first year, Facebook users donated $300 million to charities that way. We’ve experimented with the process, especially since Facebook quickly waived processing fees and began forwarding 100% of donations to charities. There are even tools now to ask people to give recurring gifts.

Talk with us if you want to learn more about implementing the program.

Amazon Market Share up 29% since 2016

Amazon Marketshare from Visual Capitalist infographic linked

Amazon is poised to crack 50% share of the $252 billion spent by U.S. shoppers in e-commerce retail. And the company is now raking in 5% of all retail according to Visual Capitalist.

Amazon is also exploring an acquisition of the Landmark movie theater chain that has 50 theaters in major markets including NY, LA, and Chicago.

Check out the VC infographic about e-commerce here