The moral of This Beautiful Life (Harper Collins, 240 pages, $24.99) is the same as that of The Odyssey: If you have a good life in Ithaca, think twice before leaving it behind. Also, watch out for the sirens. Plug your ears with wax, cover your eyes, break your laptop, do whatever it takes Read More
The ad-tech companies creating better systems to track user behavior online are flush with cash from venture capital firms, especially in New York.
“It’s a huge market and it’s growing,” says Chris Fralic, a managing partner at First Round Capital, told the Wall Street Journal. First Round is the biggest backers of this sector Read More
Savvy prosecutors are now scouring Facebook to glean clues about potential jurors.
A DA in Texas armed his prosecutors with iPads last year, and proposed trading the jury free wi-fi access in exchange for a quick “friending” to dig up more info, reports the Wall Street Journal.
In Oregon, meanwhile, a DA tends to Read More
Rachel Sterne’s major qualifications for her new job as New York City’s digital chief seem to be her social media savvy.
But apparently the attention her Facebook page received after her new gig was announced was either too much for Sterne, or didn’t jibe with her position as a public official, because she greatly Read More
Apple’s obsessive control over the apps that can be sold through its online store has come back to bite them.
Apple, Pandora and Dictionary.com were sued in federal court Monday for allegedly helping advertisers create secret profiles of iPhone users without their consent.
According to Wired’s Ryan Singel, “The tracking is possible because Apple Read More
The government’s announcement that they may create a Do Not Track registry for the web, similar to the offline Do Not Call system, has sent the digital advertising industry scrambling to clean its image.
But not everyone agrees that web tracking is an unqualified evil. This morning prominent New York VC Fred Wilson wrote Read More
The $25 billion online advertising industry is scrambling to talk the Federal Trade Commission down after the agency’s internet privacy investigation turned into calls for a national Do Not Track list, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The Open Data Partnership is a group effort by eight tracking companies you’ve never heard of, but who Read More
Not satisfied with munching on the cookies of personal info users share through their computers, ad companies are clamoring for more detailed profiles.
As the newest installment of The Journal’s What They Know series details, the next step is creating a digital fingerprint for every computing device in the world.
Like a fingerprint, every Read More
The hot new startup today is Path, a social network that lets users connect with 50 — just 50 — of their closest friends, family and lovers.
Path has all the ingredients for a hot startup. Famous founders: Dave Morin of Facebook and Shawn Fanning of Napster. Famous investors: They don’t come any bigger Read More
Following a series of Wall Street Journal articles that highlighted the ways in which some third-party applications were sharing user data with advertisers, Facebook has declared a zero-tolerance policy for any developers who sell information to data brokers.
While we determined that no private user data was sold and confirmed that transfer of these Read More
