It’s full steam ahead for AT&T, even as the Department of Justice moves ahead with an appeal to stop its $85 billion merger with Time Warner. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said he thinks the chances the government will succeed in its appeal of its merger are “remote.” …
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Spotify thinks Drake is the answer to everything. But people are done having the singer shoved in their face. Excessive promotion of the singer on the music streaming platform — even on ad-free accounts — has people fuming and demanding for a refund, Billboard reported Monday. Drake was so prominently featured in promotion for his new album Scorpion, his photos …
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Brave, a browser that blocks conventional online ads and strips privacy-invading trackers off the web, has begun testing its own technology for supplying advertisements. The startup, co-founded by former Firefox leader Brendan Eich, announced a special test version of Brave that will show about 250 prepackaged ads to those who sign up for an early-access version of the software. It’ll …
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I’m as scared as anybody that all of my oh-so-personal data is being turned into a giant dossier that’ll help companies and governments target me in all kinds of seminefarious ways. Shadow profiles and the like. But if Google’s just revamped Ad Settings tool is any indication, those potentially privacy-penetrating algorithms are still pretty dumb. So dumb that I’m happy …
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WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton reportedly left $1.3 billion behind by leaving Facebook. According to The Wall Street Journal, both men chose to depart after a number of long-standing disputes. The major divide was over monetizing the messaging app, which has 1.5 billion users. Koum and Acton had been resistant to adopting Facebook’s widely lucrative targeted advertising model, …
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Mark Zuckerberg has done a lot of apologizing and explaining in the weeks since he was forced to tell the world that data from 87 million Facebook users was co-opted and misused without their — or his company’s — knowledge. This week, he gets to say it all over again when he faces about 5,000 developers who gather near Facebook’s …
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Brave Software has 2.2 million people using its ad-blocking web browser and expects it’ll roughly double that, or more, by year’s end. “User growth remains strong, and we anticipate millions more by the end of 2018,” Brave said in a blog post Friday. Roughly three quarters use the browser on mobile devices and one quarter on personal computers, and most …
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AT&T and Time Warner are done making their case that the US government needs to get out of the way of their marriage. AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, and John Stankey, the AT&T executive in charge of the merger, all took the stand this week to defend the $85 billion media deal, which the …
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If the Facebook privacy scandal has you freaked out, you might be interested to know that Firefox for iPhones and iPads now blocks websites from tracking your online behavior. Mozilla’s browser has an option called tracking protection that blocks tracking software embedded in websites — from website publishers, advertising companies and tech giants like Google and Facebook. Now that option …
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Facebook last week said it would support efforts to regulate political ads. Now US senators are urging Alphabet and Twitter to do the same. The Honest Ads Act is a senate bill that would require tech companies to disclose how political ads were targeted and how much they cost. It’s sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and …
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