Good Monday morning. It’s May 14th. Ramadan begins tomorrow evening and continues through June 14th. About 3.5 million Americans are expected to observe Ramadan, which includes fasting during daylight hours.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.  There are also video links to another 10 minutes of video. 

Highlights

• Digital ad spending during 2017 was $88 billion, a 21% increase over the previous year. Don’t try conceptualizing $88 billion. Think about 21 percent YOY growth.

• Online political advertising’s future continues with the first wave of agencies, including Silver Beacon, authorized for political advertising on Facebook although the process is still a bit glitchy

• Right after the video of robots running and a Google demo of a computer talking to a person on a telephone wowed the Internet this week, Google said it had plans to make tech less addictive. 

Questions or comments as you read this week’s Spotlight?  Write George

And it would be great if you encouraged your colleagues to get their own copy. They can do that at this link.

Political Ads Released, New Rules in Place

Congressional Democrats released 3,500 ads that were purchased by a Russian company over a two year period. We’ve looked through many and read many analyses. The key points:

• The ads targeted people on divisive issues. Feel strongly about health care coverage or another hot button topic? You were targeted, but so were people on the other side. The goal was to create dissension.
• It worked.
• USA Today did the best analysis we read. They found that more than half the ads were about race and another 25% were about crime, often with a racial component. 

Hint:  Don’t get caught up in the money spent or even the impression count that describes the number of times something was displayed. Every ad you see or hear in any media counts as an impression. We don’t know the real impact yet of the 25 million times that the racially divisive ads were seen.

What this means for the future

We told you last week about Facebook’s new political ad authorization process. The process works, but the execution of new ads was glitchy this weekend. Google is launching the same type of program as Facebook approves the first agencies to place political and issue advertising and hopefully things will run smoothly when after a few more days.

Facebook’s list of “political issues” that will require disclosure: abortion, budget, civil rights, crime, economy, education, energy, environment, foreign policy, government reform, guns, health, immigration, infrastructure, military, poverty, social security, taxes, terrorism, and values.

We’re pretty sure we can advertise toast, but it can’t be buttered and can only be made from white bread, not whole wheat.

Why this is Important

The issues surrounding online political advertising are summarized in a fantastic BuzzFeed News piece. They found that they could access an unreleased Facebook tool that shows where a Facebook page’s managers are based.

The page above that shows an American flag and is titled “Conservative Fighters” is managed by 17 people who live in Macedonia and Germany. 

There are plenty of other pages, not ads but pages, that are run from overseas locations. Some mention political candidates or the president.  That’s a problem that won’t be fixed by a political ad authorization process. Read the article here.

“We are living in a science fiction world,” my wife Joan told me. She’s right, and it’s not just Atlas.

Google made people gasp this week with these phone calls that Google boss Sundar Pichai played at a developer’s conference.

One big issue: the human-like non verbal comments such as the “umms” and the other vocal tics. Another big issue: the automated assistant doesn’t introduce itself as a machine. We’re in uncharted territory–the science fiction world my wife mentioned. Our laws, ethics, and education don’t address these issues yet.

Even as Google introduced this amazing technology and former Google company Boston Dynamics showed its robotics tricks, Google made a pitch to make tech less addictive. The initiative is called “Digital Wellbeing”.

Three features in the rollout:

1. Turning your phone screen side down will activate “Shush” and silence calls and notifications.

2. “Wind Down” activates color filters on your phone during the times you set so that looking at your phone doesn’t disturb your sleep cycle.

3. And you can see how much time you spend on different apps on your phone with “Dashboard View”. You can even set the system to alert you if you’ve used your phone longer than you planned overall or in certain apps.

Spotlighted

Facebook is rolling out new fundraising functions for non profits. If you work at a nonprofit org, you need to be putting them on your Facebook page. 

Media company Gannett has purchased a leading Google advertising agency that also created its own software. Could they be positioning to supplement newspaper advertising online?

Amazon has stopped purchasing Google shopping ads. That’s good for retailers who won’t have as much price competition. Amazon is one of the few companies who could stop advertising on Google and remain okay.

Great Data

Spotlight

News You Need to Know Now

Good Monday morning. It’s May 7th. Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers this Sunday, including the mothers in heart and spirit who never ad the opportunity to raise a child.

Highlights

• • F8, Facebook’s big annual show, happened this week. There is plenty of news including the new dating function everyone is talking about.

• • Google introduced dot app–a place for mobile app downloads. They bought the rights to the entire top-level domain three years ago for only $25 million.

• • Twitter left a password file unprotected. Any password used there may have been compromised. If you’re still using the same password for multiple services, you need to stop. And if you’re using them on Twitter and another service, you need to change both.

Facebook Starts Advertiser ID Program

Facebook’s promise to track individuals purchasing political ads became real Friday afternoon when the first requests were sent to advertisers. This is part of my personal application. Here’s the process:

• An application with a physical mailing address.
• A copy of a driver’s license or passport including size and color requirements for the image.
• A portion of your Social Security Number (like a credit application)
• A letter with a code is sent to the address on the license to be entered in Facebook.
• Only after all that matches are you cleared to run ads.
• Whoever pays for the ads also has to be identified.
• That identity will be be published for anyone to see, as will the ads that are run.

There are holes in this program. U.S. agencies could work for another country. Applicants can lie. But by making the information public, Facebook transfers a big part of political ads verification to the Internet. The wisdom of crowds won’t find everything improper, but you can be certain that people on the other side of an issue or political race will be motivated to look.

That’s the other promise Facebook made. These political ads are also defined as issue ads. Those can be anything from health care to gun violence prevention to the environment and everything in between.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” wrote Judge Louis Brandeis in 1914. This type of advertising transparency has never been available before–and still isn’t required for broadcast ads.

EU’s Privacy Wars

Rigid data privacy laws in the EU take effect at the end of this month. They’re included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and cover the privacy rights of all citizens of EU countries regardless of where a company is located.

This is why you’ve seen more notices on websites in the last month than you probably have in previous months combined. Any organization storing information, even an email address, from an EU citizen is subject to the regulation. 

Google is warning its advertising partners, those who place and those who publish ads, about the issue. 

Does a Main Street retailer need to address this? Well, maybe. You should check with your attorney. At the very least, your organization should have a great privacy policy that it abides by. Talk with your attorney.

Spotlighted

We often tell you about voice being the new frontier of search. AudioBurst agrees and has an audio search engine for podcast and radio broadcasts. 

Facebook’s dating service will require a separate profile according to reporting at Recode. There will be a separate messaging app and a mix of automated suggestions and the ability to match others manually. And Facebook says that it will allow all users to clear their history on the platform. This is potentially the biggest program they announced.

Great Data

Understanding probability is a critical part of deciphering your organization’s online performance.

This fantastic website helps people understand that through a live experiment with your own birthday. If you had a fun statistics professor, you may have already participated in the birthday paradox. This website is still worth your time in how it educates users in a technical subject.

Featured image of political symbols: Larisa

Spotlight

News You Need to Know Now

Good morning. It’s Monday, April 23rd.  Alphabet, Google’s parent company, declares earnings after the market closes this afternoon. Analysts expect to learn more about the value of the company’s investment in Uber and several other investments including Credit Karma and Auction.com. Meanwhile, Facebook reports Wednesday afternoon. Expect lots of news about both companies.

Today’s Spotlight takes about 4 minutes to read.

Highlights

• Facebook privacy is still making news. We have lots of coverage on web privacy for you this week.
• Changes to Google Search, Maps, and Chat are done or in the works.
• We have a must-see video showing how easily people can manipulate video, a must-read article about a data broker, and a can’t-miss series about regretful Internet execs.

Facebook to Ask About Privacy Choices 

The company announced this week that all users regardless of where they live will be asked how they will allow Facebook to use their data. “We’ll ask everyone to make choices about ads based on data from partners [and whether you want to continue sharing] political, religious, and relationship information on your profile,” the company promised in a statement.

Facebook faces a gauntlet that includes declining approval ratings, tough privacy laws from the EU that start in May, and a lingering malaise expressed by analysts that next quarter’s ad revenues will slip.

The video below is not from Facebook. It was created by comedian Jordan Peele and published on Buzzfeed this week to show how easily videos can be altered. Israeli technologist Aviv Ovadya spoke for a world skeptical about video and audio proof by asking, “What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened…”

This video has NSFW language AND it’s by an Obama supporter. But it also shows how easy it is to have software originally used by people to fake porn creating hoax videos. Stick with it in a private space. It’s only 73 seconds and shows how any of us can be taken in by a good fake.

More Privacy

We told you weeks ago about analytics firm Palantir and their secret program with the New Orleans Police Department. Bloomberg followed up on The Verge’s original reporting with “Palantir Knows Everything About You“. Police programs in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are studied as is a JPMorgan finance program.

Big quote from a JPMorgan cyber security exec in this must-read article: “Nefarious ideas became trivial to implement; everyone’s a suspect, so we monitored everything. It was a pretty terrible feeling.”

Regretful Execs

New York magazine has been running a series called “The Internet Apologizes“.

We’ve written about Facebook’s first President and a former Google ethicist making startling comments about these world-changing organizations. Last week we shared news from Jaron Lanier’s TED talk that included this line about Facebook and Google, “I can’t call these things social networks anymore. I call them behavior modification empires.” If you’ve lost a geek like Lanier, you’re tech-cred is crashing.

That’s the “techlash” that Axios was first among mainstream media to start calling out last year. Now New York’s Internet Apologizes series demands your attention. Look for a longer piece by Lanier. There’s also former Reddit exec Dan McComas saying,” …my time at Reddit made the world a worse place.”

There’s also early Facebook investor Roger McNamee who says, “You have created a persuasion engine unlike any created in history.”

It’s big stuff. Many people who built what exists online today are expressing remorse.

Spotlighted – the Google Edition

• Problems ahead for Google. A study claims that Android apps in the Google Play store may improperly be collecting data from kids under the age of 13. WaPo article with the news
• Ghttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/16/thousands-of-android-apps-may-be-illegally-tracking-children-study-finds/?utm_term=.375897d82d6f&wpisrc=nl_tech&wpmm=1oogle announced it made another “broad core change” to its search rankings this month. That’s two in five weeks. If you’re seeing traffic fluctuating at your org’s website, look at the details. Or call us. We’re pretty good at that.
• Google is also removing many items from its “autocomplete” function. That’s the part of its software that tries guessing what you want to search for as you type. Spam, adult content phrases, and other non-family friendly phrases are all getting axed.
• Google is also said to be introducing map directions that include landmarks. What a great idea. “Turn right at the Burger King” is a lot easier to deal with then “Turn right in 600 feet”.
• And finally, you know those text/SMS messages that have been with us forever? A report in The Verge focuses on Google convincing carriers selling Android phones to revamp texting.