Toronto-based Feroot Security "found that so-called tracking pixels from the TikTok parent company were present in 30 U.S. state-government websites across 27 states," reports the Wall Street Journal, "including some where the app has been banned from state networks and devices." The review was performed in January and February. The presence of that code means that U.S. state governments around the country are inadvertently participating in a data-collection effort for a foreign-owned company, one that senior Biden administration officials and lawmakers of both parties have said could be harmful to U.S. national security and the privacy of Americans.

Administrators who manage government websites use such pixels to help measure the effectiveness of advertising they have purchased on TikTok.... The presence of the TikTok tracking code on government websites underlines the challenge for those who deem the China-owned app a potential data-security threat. Lawmakers in both parties are considering a nationwide ban, but simply uprooting the app from U.S. smartphones wouldn't stop all data-tracking activities....

Feroot found that the average website it studied had more than 13 embedded pixels. Google's were far and away the most common, with 92% of websites examined having some sort of Google tracking pixel embedded. About 50% of the websites the firm examined had Microsoft Corp. or Facebook pixels. TikTok had a presence in less than 10% of sites examined.

Twitch announced plans to lay off 400 employees at the company. It comes just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch's business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon's plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units.

"Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. "In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce." While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs -- a familiar story we're seeing play out across the tech industry. Further reading: What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs?

Amazon is cutting another 9,000 jobs, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote to employees in a memo on Monday. The move, which impacts roles in AWS, PXT, Advertising and Twitch, comes weeks after the e-commerce group said it would eliminate 18,000 jobs. Jassy: As part of our annual planning process, leaders across the company work with their teams to decide what investments they want to make for the future, prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole.

Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications." The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...."

The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the following you would most like to know more about." The survey went on to list topics such as privacy, syncing passwords across devices, and shopping features.... Users were asked to rate the importance of features including text to speech, extensions, the availability to sync data across desktop and mobile devices, and — notably — blocking third party cookies.

Amazon seems to be seriously considering a web browser of its own, and it comes at a time when it would have an unusual impact on the advertising business. The ad industry is bracing for cataclysmic change as Google moves closer to killing third-party cookies in Chrome, the world's most popular web browser, which would kneecap one of the primary ways businesses track consumers for ads.... Part of what makes Amazon so attractive to marketers is the fact that the company sits on a treasure trove of data about what consumers are buying and what their shopping habits are like. If Amazon could match that information with the data collection that comes from a web browser, it could tip the scales of internet advertising in favor of the retail giant.
One thing Amazon asked users is whethered they'd be convinced to download and try a browser if it offered "AI-enabled tab, history, and bookmarks management to automatically sort these into categories for quick search and retrieval."

The Brazilian government is studying whether to regulate Internet platforms with content that earns revenue such as advertising, its secretary for digital policies, Joao Brant, said on Friday. Reuters reports: The idea would be for a regulator to hold such platforms, not consumers, accountable for monetized content, Brant told Reuters. Another goal is "to prevent the networks from being used for the dissemination and promotion of crimes and illegal content" especially after the riots by supporters of former far-right President JairBolsonaro in Brasilia in January, fueled by misinformation about the election he lost in October.

Brant said President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government also intends to make companies responsible for stopping misinformation, hate speech and other crimes on their social media platforms. Platforms would not be held responsible for content individually, but for how diligent they are in protecting the "digital environment," he said in an interview. Brant did not detail what the regulatory body would look like, but said the government wants to regulate monetized content and prevent the platforms from spreading misinformation.

Meta on Friday launched its subscription service in the U.S., which would allow Facebook and Instagram users pay for verification in the same vein as Elon Musk-owned Twitter. From a report: The Meta Verified service will give users a blue badge after they verify their accounts using a government ID and will cost $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 a month on Apple's iOS system and Google-owned Android, Meta said in a statement. The service, which Meta said it was testing in February, follows in the footsteps of Snapchat as well as messaging app Telegram and marks the latest effort by a social media company to diversify its revenue away from advertising.

A Dutch court hearing a class action lawsuit on Wednesday found that a European subsidiary of Meta, Facebook Ireland, improperly used personal data of Dutch citizens between 2010 and 2020, saying the company had "violated the law." From a report: "Personal information was processed for the purposes of advertising when in this case that is not allowed," a summary of the Amsterdam court ruling said. "Personal information was given to third parties without Facebook users being informed and without there being a legal basis to do so." The decision was directed at Facebook Ireland because it is the part of the company that oversees the processing of Dutch user data. The case has not yet progressed to the phase where any damages could be claimed.

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API.

"For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users."

[...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Saturday that it would end availability of news content for Canadians on its platforms if the country's Online News Act passes in its current form. From a report: The "Online News Act," or House of Commons bill C-18, introduced in April last year laid out rules to force platforms like Meta and Alphabet's Google to negotiate commercial deals and pay news publishers for their content. "A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable," a Meta spokesperson said as reason to suspend news access in the country. Meta's move comes after Google last month started testing limited news censorship as a potential response to the bill. Canada's news media industry has asked the government for more regulation of tech companies to allow the industry to recoup financial losses it has suffered in the years as tech giants like Google and Meta steadily gain greater market share of advertising. We've watched this movie before.

"Recently, on a YouTube channel, I said something terrible," confesses a staff writer for the Atlantic. "But I don't know what it was." Whatever it was, it was enough to get the interview demonetized, meaning no ads could be placed against it, and my host received no revenue from it.

"It does start to drive you mad," says Andrew Gold, whose channel, On the Edge, was the place where I committed my unknowable offense. Like many full-time YouTubers, he relies on the Google-owned site's AdSense program, which gives him a cut of revenues from the advertisements inserted before and during his interviews. When launching a new episode, Gold explained to me, "you get a green dollar sign when it's monetizable, and it goes yellow if it's not." Creators can contest these rulings, but that takes time — and most videos receive the majority of their views in the first hours after launch. So it's better to avoid the yellow dollar sign in the first place. If you want to make money off of YouTube, you need to watch what you say....

YouTube operates a three-strike policy for infractions: The first strike is a warning; the second prevents creators from making new posts for a week; and the third (if received within 90 days of the second) gets the channel banned.... Although many types of content may never run afoul of the guidelines...political discussions are subject to the whims of algorithms. Absent enough human moderators to deal with the estimated 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute, YouTube uses artificial intelligence to enforce its guidelines. Bots scan auto-generated transcripts and flag individual words and phrases as problematic, hence the problem with saying heroin. Even though "educational" references to drug use are allowed, the word might snag the AI trip wire, forcing a creator to request a time-consuming review....

[T]alk with everyday creators, and they are more than willing to work inside the rules, which they acknowledge are designed to make YouTube safer and more accurate. They just want to know what those rules are, and to see them applied consistently. As it stands, Gold compared his experience of being impersonally notified of unspecified infractions to working for HAL9000, the computer overlord from 2001: A Space Odyssey. ["They don't tell me if it's Nazis, heroin, or anything," Gold says later. "You're just left wondering what it was."]
The article notes that YouTube's algorithm seems to flag people who are debunking misinformation as misinformation. (One study found that purveyors of controversial content simply stop worrying about YouTube demonetizing their videos, using them to direct viewers instead to their "affiliate" links offering commissions, or to their content on other still-monetized platforms.)

In just the last three months of 2022, YouTube made almost $8 billion in advertising revenue, the article concludes. "There's a very good reason journalism is not as profitable as that: Imagine if YouTube edited its content as diligently as a legacy newspaper or television channel — even quite a sloppy one. Its great river of videos would slow to a trickle."

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. Wired reports: While the practice of buying people's location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government's ability to warrantlessly track Americans' phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. The disclosure came [Wednesday] during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation's intelligence chiefs.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau's use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: "Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?" Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising," Wray said. "I understand that we previously -- as in the past -- purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that's not been active for some time." He added that the bureau now relies on a "court-authorized process" to obtain location data from companies."

It's not immediately clear whether Wray was referring to a warrant -- that is, an order signed by a judge who is reasonably convinced that a crime has occurred -- or another legal device. Nor did Wray indicate what motivated the FBI to end the practice. In its landmark Carpenter v. United States decision, the Supreme Court held that government agencies accessing historical location data without a warrant were violating the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. But the ruling was narrowly construed. Privacy advocates say the decision left open a glaring loophole that allows the government to simply purchase whatever it cannot otherwise legally obtain. [...] Asked during the Senate hearing whether the FBI would pick up the practice of purchasing location data again, Wray replied: "We have no plans to change that, at the current time."

Reach, the owner of the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues. The Register reports: Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city. Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they're published online.

"We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial," he said, according to The Guardian. "It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor." "There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content," Mullen admitted. "The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written."

Mullen's comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.

YouTube is relaxing some of the profanity rules it introduced late last year -- "with an update outlining a less restrictive policy that will allow the use of moderate and strong profanity to be used without risking demonetization," reports Engadget. From the report: The original policy, first introduced in November, would flag any video that used rude language in the first several seconds as ineligible for advertising, with little delineation between "strong" or "moderate" swearing. The policy also seemed to apply retroactively, with many creators claiming that videos they published before the updated policy had lost their monetization status. Now, YouTube is reversing course with a tweaked set of rules that allows some swearing.

Now, creators who use colorful language in the first seven seconds of a video are still eligible for advertising, with some conditions. If the profanity is "moderate," the video won't face any restrictions -- but strong profanity in those opening seconds could result in a video only receiving "limited ads." Under the original rules, the update notes, both of these scenarios would have caused a video to be completely demonetized. Creators will be able swear more frequently after the first seven seconds without fear of losing advertising revenue, though YouTube notes that excessive swearing will still put content at risk of being demonetized or limited. The update also clarifies that strong language in background, outro or intro music should not affect monetization status.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economic Times: Meta, the owner of Facebook andInstagram, is planning a fresh round of layoffs and will cut thousands of employees as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The world's largest social networking company is eliminating more jobs, on top of a 13% reduction in November, in a bid to become a more efficient organization. In its earlier round of cuts, Meta slashed 11,000 workers in what was its first-ever major layoff.

The company has also been working to flatten its organization, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems nonessential, Bloomberg News reported in February, a move that is still being finalized and could affect thousands of staffers. The imminent round of cuts is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the "flattening," said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Meta, which has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and has shifted focus to a virtual-reality platform called the metaverse, has been asking directors and vice presidents to make lists of employees that can be let go, the people said. This phase of layoffs could be finalized in the next week, according to the people.

Meta Platforms' WhatsApp has agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy introduced in 2021, the European Commission said on Monday, following complaints from consumer bodies across Europe. From a report: The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and the European Network of consumer authorities told WhatsApp last year that it had not clarified the changes in plain and intelligible language, violating the bloc's laws. EU members' national regulators can sanction companies for breaches. WhatsApp has now agreed to explain changes to EU users' contracts and how these could affect their rights, and has agreed to display prominently the possibility for users to accept or reject the changes and ensure that users can easily close pop-up notifications on updates. The company also confirmed that users' personal data is not shared with third parties or other Meta companies, including Facebook, for advertising purposes.

Online counseling company BetterHelp has agreed to pay $7.8 million to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission that it improperly shared customers' sensitive data with companies like Facebook and Snapchat, even after promising to keep it private. The Verge reports: The proposed order, announced by the FTC on Thursday, would ban the same behavior in the future and require BetterHelp to make some changes to how it handles customer data. According to the regulator, the sign-up process for the company's service "promised consumers that it would not use or disclose their personal health data except for limited purposes." However, the FTC alleges that the company instead "used and revealed consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes."

The FTC also says that the company gave customer service agents false scripts to try and reassure users that it wasn't sharing personally identifiable or personal health information after a February 2020 report from Jezebel exposed some of its practices. The commission's complaint (PDF) accuses the company of misleading customers by putting a HIPAA seal on its website, despite the fact that "no government agency or other third party reviewed [BetterHelp]'s information practices for compliance with HIPAA, let alone determined that the practices met the requirements of HIPAA."

If the FTC's order ends up going through, the $7.8 million would go to customers who signed up for the service between August 1st, 2017, and December 31st, 2020. Here are some of the other things BetterHelp would be required to do:

- Stop sharing individually identifiable information about consumer's mental health with any third parties
- Stop misrepresenting its data collection and use policies
- Alert customers who created accounts before January 1st, 2021, that their personal info may have been used for advertising
- Obtain "affirmative express consent" from a customer before sharing information with a third party
- Reach out to third parties that received customer information and ask that it be deleted
- Establish a "comprehensive privacy program" and have an independent third party carry out privacy assessments

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Alex Heath: Meta plans to release its first pair of smart glasses with a display in 2025 alongside a neural interface smartwatch designed to control them, The Verge has learned. Meanwhile, its first pair of full-fledged AR glasses, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted will eventually be as widely used as mobile phones, is planned for 2027. The details were shared with thousands of employees in Meta's Reality Labs division on Tuesday during a roadmap presentation of its AR and VR efforts that was shared with The Verge. Altogether, they show how Meta is planning to keep investing in consumer hardware after a series of setbacks and broader cost cutting across the company.

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don't fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. [...] There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. In 2024, he said that Meta plans to ship a more "accessible" headset codenamed Ventura. "The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market."

During Tuesday's roadmap presentation, Alex Himel, the company's vice president for AR, laid out the plan for a bevy of devices through 2027. The first launch will come this fall with the second generation of Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses it released in 2021 with Luxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban. In 2025, Himel said the third generation of the smart glasses will ship with a display that he called a "viewfinder" for viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes, and translating text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a "neural interface" band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow. While Meta halted development of its smartwatch with dual cameras,Himel said that the company is still working on another smartwatch to accompany its 2025 glasses. "We don't want people to have to choose between an input device on their wrist and smartwatch functionality that they've come to love," he said. "So we are building a neural interfaces watch. Number one, this device will do input: input to control your glasses, input to control the functionality on your wrist, and input to control the world around you."

The Verge's Alex Heath adds: "Meta's first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world." These glasses will "won't be released to the public until 2027," but an "internal launch" for employees will begin in 2024.

As for advertising, Meta is planning to utilize its existing business model for these future devices. "We should be able to run a very good ads business," he said. "I think it's easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent."

"If we're hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business," he said. "A business unlike anything we've seen on mobile phones before."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shared this report about the boxy little Wuling: Priced at around $5,500 and famously outselling Tesla in China, it's a tiny, comically square car, produced in joint partnership with General Motors and SAIC. The micro EV has been fodder for articles and YouTubers — even while it's remained unavailable outside China.

Until last summer, that is, when Wuling attempted to go international. First stop: Indonesia. With its Air model selling at a mere $16,000 — less than half the price of alternatives — the minimalist EV was depicted in advertising as a gateway to the future, a slick solution for busy Indonesian city-dwellers.

Six months later, the Wuling Air now dominates EV sales in the country, according to the Association of Indonesia Automotive Industries (Gaikindo). Since entering Indonesia last August, it's sold some 8,000 vehicles. The number may be small compared to the manufacturers' sales figures in their home turfs of the U.S. and China, but it's equivalent to 78% of the EV market in the Southeast Asian country....

It's not perfect; customers complain of battery failure and the anxiety of finding charge points. But the price tag counts for a lot.... A $48,000 Nissan Leaf or Hyundai Ioniq is way out of most Indonesians' price brackets. But a Wuling — $16,000 for standard range, which lasts 250 kilometers on a full charge, and $20,000 for long-range, at 450 kilometers — is achievable.