Advertising

The cable networks for children, in decline for years, are now in a free fall. This season’s ratings for the 2-to-11 set are shaping up to be the worst yet. And few in the industry predict a turnaround. The implications are enormous for giants like Viacom and Walt Disney. Viewership of the three most-popular networks for the very young — Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and the Cartoon Network — is down more than 20 percent this season from year earlier, according to data from Nielsen.

A member of the Justice Department's criminal division and a special agent with the FBI attended Rubicon Project's digital advertising conference, Executive Exchange to speak about the future of ad fraud and crime. FBI Special Agent Evelina Aslanyan spoke at the off-the-record event to high-level executives in the advertising industry about how ad fraud represents a whole new world of crime for publishers and consumers. Alexander Mindlin, an assistant U.S. Attorney General at the DOJ's criminal division, was also in attendance.

Google parent Alphabet posted surging profits as advertisers kept swarming to the search giant amid a global debate about internet privacy that threatens to affect its main revenue generator. Alphabet’s earnings also got a multibillion-dollar boost from the company’s stakes in startups including Uber but were tempered by the costliest spending spree in its 14-year history as a public company. Net profit jumped 73% to $9.4 billion in the first quarter, up from $5.4 billion in the same period in 2017, a performance that highlights the firm’s huge lead in the global market for online ads.

In Europe and the United States, the conventional wisdom is that regulation is needed to force Silicon Valley’s digital giants to respect people’s online privacy. But new rules may instead serve to strengthen Facebook’s and Google’s hegemony and extend their lead on the internet. That’s because wary consumers are more prone to trust recognized names with their information than unfamiliar newcomers.

In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts. Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we’ve installed, demographics such as age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we’ve shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn’t use information from “sensitive categories” such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health.

Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally. In a tweak to its terms and conditions, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the European Union from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law.

After more than 10 hours of grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Congress is no closer to regulating the platform's privacy practices than it was when the hearings started. It's clear that lawmakers haven't coalesced around a regulatory end-goal, even though the threat remains.

After two days and more than 10 hours of questioning of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, there was widespread consensus among lawmakers that social media technology — and its potential for abuse — had far outpaced Washington and that Congress should step in to close the gap. But the agreement largely ended there.

"Who’s going to protect us from Facebook?" asked Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-IL) at a House Commerce Committee hearing April 11. There's currently very little recourse for Facebook users whose privacy was breached by the Cambridge Analytica leak, says Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The reason we need privacy laws is precisely because individuals lose control over their personal information when it is transferred to a business," Rotenberg said. "Privacy laws help ensure personal data is used only for its intended purpose."