Links for 25 July 2026

Programmatic Platforms Champion Transparency, But Not If It Means Giving Activists Access by Anthony Vargas. (I said I would let you know when it’s safe to turn off your ad blocker, and nope, still wretched hive of scum and villainy. This story is about good ads sneaked onto bad sites—but every time that happens, it leaves some good site with an ad slot to fill, so more of the bad ads get served. The industry has existing tools, often already standardized, just doesn’t want to use them.)

Apple Updates Its Advertising Policies by Nick Heer. (More news from how Apple is on the enshittification curve the same as any other company.)

The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA by Elizabeth Elder and Neil A. O’Brian. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. (Maybe William James was right about the cash value of beliefs, and some people are just invested in lower-return asset classes?)

Experience Better Browsing: Introducing Native Containers in Firefox 153 (This is part of the easiest way to containerize and mostly de-enshittify YouTube, now part of the browser.)

A decade after the ‘Godfather of AI’ said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast vy Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. Over the last 10 years, the number of active radiologists in the U.S. has grown by about 10%, said Christoph Herpfer, an economist and business administration professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies health care finance and physician labor markets. We actually have a huge shortage of radiologists. So the exact opposite of this prediction has happened, he told Fortune.

Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training by Emma Loffhagen. The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways – for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks – but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products.

Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI by Reece Rogers. (not likely. Number must go up.) Related: https://マリウス.com/the-rise-of-the-bullshittery/), The Lies They’re Telling Towns And Tribes About The Benefits Of AI Data Centers by Karl Bode, The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible by Victor Tangermann.

Please, I Beg You, Do Not Fill My TV With Pregnancy Ads by Victoria McNally—associate editor of AdExchanger. (Marketing people know that this stuff is creepy as hell, and counterproductive for the brand, but they’re so cohesive as a group that it will take a swift kick from outside to stop the slide into chickenization.) Related: Where Did It All Go Wrong For Agencies? by Brian Jacobs.

Google’s new use of IPs in Europe by Alan Chapell. Hooray, Google imposes yet another compliance tax on companies using their services. Accordingly, anyone running a third-party CMP supporting Adsense must surface Feature 3 in Google’s vendor entry before August 3 or risk understated-disclosure exposure and limited-ads degradation (not to mention legal liability). (Somewhere in Mountain View, Google lawyers are passing the bong and laughing their asses off about being able to make people do all this stuff. I got it, I got it, make them quack like a duck next, they’ll totally do it!)

Meta’s AI advertising dreams have become a nightmare for brands by Lara O’Reilly, Sydney Bradley, and Lucia Moses. Meta is pushing advertisers to use its AI tools — and results are proving chaotic: strangely twisted limbs, gibberish writing, or entirely changed products. Meta’s response to brands: That’s on you, not us. (Don’t worry, when Meta takes control of how the ad results get measured across all media, these ads will turn out to be the best ads ever.)