Items tagged with Advertising
Last year saw a rise in threat actors abusing Microsoft Office macros to infect their victims’ systems with malware, prompting Microsoft to block macros embedded in documents downloaded from the internet. In response, threat actors have had to pivot to alternative malware distribution and infection methods, including...
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Over the past week, Gmail users have been reporting abuse of the Google Ads platform. However, rather than conducting ad fraud or placing ads that distribute malware, the actors behind this recent activity are leveraging the Google Ads invitation system to direct traffic to various to risky websites. These sites are...
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A massive ad fraud campaign has shut down after undergoing mitigation efforts organized by HUMAN, cybersecurity firm that works to distinguish human beings from bots for the purpose of disrupting cybercrime. The ad fraud campaign, dubbed “VASTFLUX” by members of HUMAN’s Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team...
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Do you ever feel like company advertisers are doing more than listening to you? Let's face it, they probably are. You might be concerned to hear that your pocket smart device is also tracking where you are. This is not new information for most people. Many use GPS mapping apps, such as Google Maps, Waze, and Apple...
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Internal moves and discussions at Apple may indicate that the company is moving to grow its advertising business. Apple already generates around $4 billion in ad revenue every year. However, according to Bloomberg, Apple’s vice president of the ad group, Todd Teresi, is pushing for a significant expansion of the...
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Tech companies are often inconsistent in their stances towards privacy. Take Google for example; the web search and advertising giant is forcing better data collection and sharing transparency in the Google Play Store and recently joined other big tech firms to back legislation banning the use of geofence and keyword...
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The recent feud between Apple and Facebook has been well documented. The companies have been at odd for years, but tensions between the two came to a head most recently when Apple detailed its newest privacy guidelines at WWDC 2020. Those guidelines would force companies to disclose how a customer's data was being...
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The battle for paying new publishers in Australia has ramped up today after Facebook took some drastic measures. The social media company has now blocked Australian news from being shared on the platform globally after the threat of new rules loomed from the country's government. Interestingly enough, this action has...
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If you looked away for a split second, you might have missed it, but Reddit ran its first Super Bowl (or "Superb Owl") advertisement yesterday. Within a flash, a text box that looked something like a Reddit post appeared. During the short five-second timeframe, the ad hailed the /r/WallStreetBets escapades and...
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Facebook has been working hard to adhere to Apple's new privacy policy that will soon be implemented across its iOS and iPadOS platforms. Apple's goal is to give users more granular control over what personally-identifiable data can be obtained and used by installed apps. And that pertains to all third-party apps; no...
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Cookies of the edible kind are delicious and comforting, whereas cookies of the technological kind can save, store, and track data in web browsers across browsing sessions. Companies can use them for good or bad things depending on the implementation from a website, like Twitter, Facebook, or others. When it comes to...
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Both Facebook and Google have come under scrutiny in recent years over antitrust and privacy abuses. In late October, the United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company was abusing its power as a "monopoly gatekeeper" to the internet for "billions of users and...
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Months after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election concluded, there are still allegations that Russia meddled in the process to help sway voter opinion. Google has been running an investigation to see whether Russian operatives might have exploited its advertising system in an attempt to interfere with the election...
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Companies can be a little overzealous when it comes to serving up ads. Even so, HTC appeared to hit a new low when its TouchPal keyboard that comes pre-installed on some Android devices started pushing out ads to users. This did not sit well with affected users, many of which took to posting their grievance on Reddit...
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Feel left out not seeing advertisements in Facebook's Messenger? Don't fret: that's going to be changing real soon. Following what Facebook touts as being a successful test in Australia and Thailand, the social media giant is planning to expand advertising in its Messenger service to the rest of the world.
For...
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It is often said in regards to free online services such as Facebook that if you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. Fair enough, but that does not mean there are no lines that can be crossed. Facebook seems to have stepped over one with a sophisticated algorithm that lets advertisers target...
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YouTube remains a free service for all (well, as long as you aren’t a subscriber to YouTube Red), so we have to put up with ads from a time to time to enjoy our daily allotment of cat videos and other time wasters. However, Google has finally gotten the hint that one particular format for its video advertising may be...
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In no uncertain terms, Facebook says "discriminatory advertising has no place" on the world's largest social network. To keep it off of there, Facebook last fall started providing better education to advertisers about its prohibition against discrimination. It also beefed up the procedures it uses to enforce...
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This past weekend, we talked about how Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg were planning to combat the "fake news" problem we've likely all seen on a regular basis. This comes hot on the heels of Donald Trump becoming president-elect, as it's a no secret that this political season has been rife with misleading...
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If you're responsible for creating advertising campaigns for a website or a Web service, you need the confidence that you're going to see a good return-on-investment. To gauge that, you're going to listen to the promises of the company or site that hosts the advertising platform. Unfortunately, those promises are sometimes inaccurate - even
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If Google had been hoping that the European Union would back off on its pursuit of proving that it's anti-competitive, it appears that the company hasn't been hoping hard enough. Today, the EU shot another set of charges at Google for anti-competitive practices, this time squarely targeting its AdSense for Search...
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For nearly a decade, Verizon ran a series of ads featuring actor Paul Marcarelli delivering the tagline, "Can you hear me now?" It's still a phrase that's familiar to many people, but in case you haven't heard, it's 2016 and apparently "every network is great," or so says the former Verizon pitchman who's made the...
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