Shit has gotten so out of control thanks to /r/wallstreetbets that Robinhood stopped trading shares not just in GameStop, but also in AMC (a movie threatre chain), Blackberry (yeah, that Blackberry), Nokia and a few other companies WSB was hyping up. Thousands of pissed off Redditors left complaints and 1-star reviews on the Google Play Store for the Robinhood app about the trading ban, which Google swiftly deleted under its policy to stop the manipulation of an app's rating. Various hedge funds that bet Gamestop would shit the bed, have in fact, shit the bed themselves. This financial tug of war has attracted the attention of politicans, with the US Senate Committee on Banking to discuss how the "SEC and Congress to make the economy work for everyone not just Wall Street". Fuck yeah, burn it all down!!!
Apple has celebrated Data Privacy Day by releasing a consumer focused whitepaper called "A Day in the Life of Your Data" to explain how various companies use your smartphone to track you and all the ways Apple tries to stop it. They also confirmed that the App Tracking Transparency feature promised last year will be made available in the next update to iOS. The icing on the cake however is the big dog Tim Cook giving a speech at a virtual "Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection" conference, blasting Facebook. He didn't mention Facebook by name but we all knew who he was talking about. He said that "at a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement" and that "it is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost - of polarisation, of lost trust and, yes, of violence".
The ACCC has handed in its Digital Advertising Services Inquiry report and it's pretty much 200+ pages calling Google an anti-competitive sack of shit. The ACCC found that "Google likely engages in anti-competitive behaviour in the ad tech services sector, facilitated by its 'unparalleled' access to user data, and often favours its own products", "that Google enjoys about 70% of the total revenue from ad tech services in Australia and has 70% of impressions across users and businesses" and that "Google's significant presence across the whole ad tech supply chain, combined with its significant data advantage, means Google is likely to have the ability and the incentive to preference its own ad tech businesses in ways that affect competition". Sounds like a perfect reason to regulate the hell out of Google's Australian operations. Maybe some competition in the digital advertising market would allow less creepy tracking and data harvesting options to emerge and be viable?
📻 Oblivious - Jessica Lea Mayfield
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