Good morning, AdExchanger

AdExchanger just ran this, by me: Take A Break, Compliance Nerds. Privacy Is A Research Problem Now.

Some recent good news for the state of California is that we’re—clearly, now that the Legislature has spoken—not not reliant on regulators to protect privacy. Private right of action under CIPA is still a thing. And that’s good, because laws and regulations are always going to be a noisy, laggy version of people’s privacy norms. In California, regular people have a much more direct decision-making role on surveillance risks, as jurors.

More than 4,000 CIPA lawsuits have been filed, which makes the private right of action a bigger concern than CalPrivacy or the attorney general’s office. Müge Fazlioglu, a principal researcher at the IAPP, calls the situation a Multibillion-Dollar Privacy Problem, but from the point of view of a legit business, this is a big win. Lawyer letters might look scary, but CIPA lawsuits are directly addressing the issues consumers care about most—by targeting the inbound data flows to Google and Meta.icymi: Facts and Fiction on the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the problematic SB 690 on the Oakland Privacy site

Big Tech ML gets the info needed for adversarial personalization (such as price discrimination, scams, and political and health) largely from pixel/SDK/CAPI records passed in by legit companies. And, because for every positive outcome for a customer there’s a sale for a legit business, a win for customers is a win for the businesses that earn the money that would have gone to Big Tech and to deceptive sellers.

Anyway, please check it out.

Bonus links

DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising by Devanshi Nishar. Good example of adversarial personalization. Links to a New York Times investigation of how gambling apps target likely losers. (IMHO states should require gambling apps to disclose targeting practices as part of their applications fo state licenses)

Why are workers losing? by Richard Murphy. Corporate profits, dividends, rents hidden within those profits, and capital gains are the direct beneficiaries of the contrast between the declining labour share and the rising return to capital. (Maybe part of the problem has been not enough IT and stats skills on the labor side? Related: DCWP Launches Research and Analytics Division to Uncover Corporate Abuse)

Your Donations at Work: One Year of Sponsored Servo Development Last September, the Servo project announced that long-time maintainer Josh Bowman-Matthews (@jdm) would work part-time on improving the Servo contributor experience, entirely funded by the monthly donations on OpenCollective and GitHub. In his own words, here is a look back over the past year!

Apple Intelligence Taking Up 30GB+ on Some Macs Running macOS 27 by Tim Hardwick. While using Apple Intelligence is optional, downloading its on-device models is not. Apple in macOS 27 and iOS 27 removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence, so users unequivocally have to set aside space for Apple’s models. In an era where memory and storage costs are rising because of AI, the irony of this situation cannot be lost. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating, though. (It’s becoming more and more clear that ultimately Apple has to enshittify to the same level as any platform owned by a publicly traded company, because they have the same investors.)