Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to PlayStation and Nintendo. From a report: Xbox CFO Tim Stuart said during the Wells Fargo TMT Summit this week that the goal is to make first-party games and Game Pass available on "every screen that can play games," and this includes rival consoles. "It's a bit of a change of strategy. Not announcing anything broadly here, but our mission is to bring our first-party experiences [and] our subscription services to every screen that can play games," Stuart said. "That means smart TVs, that means mobile devices, that means what we would have thought of as competitors in the past like PlayStation and Nintendo."

Stuart said Game Pass is a "high margin" business for Microsoft, along with first-party games and advertising. These are all areas that Microsoft plans to expand into significantly in the time ahead, Stuart said. The executive added that buying Activision Blizzard helps Microsoft get there faster than it might have been able to on its own. For the advertising part specifically, the Candy Crush mobile game series from King -- which is now owned by Microsoft -- is deeply embedded with ads and microtransactions.

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states.

Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...."

It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them — even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic — the next generation of users — that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth.
More from the Wall Street Journal: An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...."

"In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint...

The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month...

The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.

"The abolition of third-party cookies will make it possible to protect privacy-related data such as what sites users visit and what pages they view from advertising companies," notes the Japan-based site Gigazine.

And this month "Google has confirmed that it is on track to start disabling third-party cookies across its Chrome browser in a matter of weeks," writes TechRadar: An internal email published online sees Google software engineer Johann Hofmann share with colleagues the company's plan to switch off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users from Q1 2024 — a plan that was shared months ago and that, surprisingly, remains on track, given the considerable pushbacks so far... Hofmann explains that Google is still awaiting a UK Competition and Markets Authority consultation in order to address any final concerns before "Privacy Sandbox" gets the go-ahead.
The Register explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" idea: Since 2019 — after it became clear that European data protection rules would require rethinking how online ads work — Google has been building a set of ostensibly privacy-preserving ad tech APIs known as the Privacy Sandbox... One element of the sandbox is the Topics API: that allows websites to ask Chrome directly what the user is interested in, based on their browser history, so that targeted ads can be shown. Thus, no need for any tracking cookies set by marketers following you around, though it means Chrome squealing on you unless you tell it not to...

Peter Snyder, VP of privacy engineering at Brave Software, which makes the Brave browser, told The Register in an email that the cookie cutoff and Privacy Sandbox remains problematic as far as Brave is concerned. "Replacing third-party cookies with Privacy Sandbox won't change the fact that Google Chrome has the worst privacy protections of any major browser, and we're very concerned about their upcoming plans," he said. "Google's turtle-paced removal of third-party cookies comes along with a large number of other changes, which when taken together, seriously harm the progress other browsers are making towards a user-first, privacy-protecting Web.

"Recent Google Chrome changes restrict the ability for users to modify, make private, and harden their Web experience (Manifest v3), broadcasting users' interests to websites they visit (Topics), dissolving privacy boundaries on the Web (Related Sites), offloading the battery-draining costs of ad auctions on users (FLEDGE/Protected Audience API), and reducing user control and Web transparency (Signed Exchange/WebBundles)," Snyder explained. "And this is only a small list of examples from a much longer list of harmful changes being shipped in Chrome."

Snyder said Google has characterized the removal of third-party cookies as getting serious about privacy, but he argued the truth is the opposite. "Other browsers have shown that a more private, more user-serving Web is possible," he said. "Google removing third-party cookies should be more accurately understood as the smallest possible change it can make without harming Google's true priority: its own advertising business."
The Register notes that other browser makers such as Apple, Brave, and Mozilla have already begun blocking third-party cookies by default, while Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge "provide that option, just not out of the box."

EFF senior staff technologist Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told The Register that "When Google Chrome finishes the project on some unspecified date in the future, it will be a great day for privacy on the web. According to the announcement, the actual phased rollout is slated to begin in Q3 2024, with no stated deadline to reach 100 percent. Let's hope Google's advertising wing does not excessively delay these critical privacy improvements."

TechRadar points out that after the initial testing period in 2024, Google will begin its phased rollout of the cookie replacement program — starting in June.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The popular party game "Cards Against Humanity" continued their tradition of practical jokes on Black Friday. They created a new social network where users can perform only one action: posting the word "yowza."

Then announced it on their official social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and X...

Regardless of what words you type into the window, they're replaced with the word yowza. "For just $0.99, you'll get an exclusive black check by your name," reads an announcement on the site, "and the ability to post a new word: awooga."

It's a magical land where "yowfluencers" keep "reyowzaing" the "yowzas" of other users. And there's also a tab for trending hashtags. (Although, yes, they all seem to be "yowza".) But they've already gotten a write up in the trade industry publication Advertising Age.

"With every bad thing happening in the world, social media is always right there, making it worse," a spokesperson said.... "[W]e asked ourselves: Is there a way we could make a social network that doesn't suck? At first, the answer was 'no.' The content moderation problem is just too hard. And then we thought, why not solve the content moderation problem by having no content? That's Yowza...."

When creating your profile on the network there's a dropdown menu for specifying your age and location — although all of the choices are yowza. More details from Advertising Age:

The company said the word "yowza" was the first that came to mind when its creative teams were brainstorming—and it just stuck. "It's dumb, it's ridiculous, it means nothing. It's perfect," the rep said.

And the service is still evolving, with fresh user upgrades. The official Yowza store will now also sell you the ability to also post the word Shazam — for $29.99. (Also on sale are 100,000 followers — for 99 cents.) But there's also an official FAQ which articulates the service's deep commitment to protecting their users' privacy.

Do you promise you won't share my private information with the Chinese Communist Party, like TikTok?

Yowza.

Lenovo has filed a lawsuit against Asus, claiming that the company's laptops infringe on four of their patents. "Lenovo is seeking damages and for Asus to stop selling Zenbook laptops and other allegedly infringing products in the U.S.," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The lawsuit [PDF] centers on four patents. The first, entitled "Methods and apparatus for transmitting in resource blocks" was issued in 2021 and relates to minimizing the delay experienced during an uplink package transmission by reducing the number of steps for a wireless device to upload data. Lenovo's lawsuit, which uses Asus' Zenbook Pro 14 OLED (UX6404) as an example of an allegedly infringing product, also claims Asus is selling laptops that violate the wireless wake-on-LAN power management patent issued to Lenovo in 2010.

Another patent Lenovo is suing over was issued in 2010 and entitled "Touchpad diagonal scrolling." It allows users to "initiate a diagonal scroll at any location on a touchpad by using two fingers," the lawsuit says. Finally, Lenovo is upset about Asus' purported infringing of its "Dual shaft hinge with angle timing shaft mechanism" patent rewarded in 2014. Lenovo describes it as a hinge block enabling 2-in-1 laptops to go from clamshell mode to tablet mode. For this accused patent infringement, Lenovo's lawsuit points to Asus' Zenbook Flip 14 UX461, which Asus advertises as having a 360-degree "ErgoLift" hinge that "lifts and tilts the keyboard into the perfect typing position when the display is rotated into laptop mode."

As noted by The Register today, in a letter to the ITC dated November 15 [PDF], Lenovo said it wants Asus to "cease and desist from marketing, advertising, distributing, offering for sale, selling, or otherwise transferring, including the movement or shipment of inventory" products that infringe upon the four patents in question. In a further dig, Lenovo added that a limited exclusion order wouldn't harm US consumers or competition, due to Asus' smaller market share. According to the IDC, Asus represented about 7.1 percent of the PC market (which includes laptops and desktops) in Q3 2023. Lenovo led at 23.5 percent.

Google pays Apple 36% of the revenue it earns from search advertising made through the Safari browser, the main economics expert for the Alphabet unit said Monday. From a report: Kevin Murphy, a University of Chicago professor, disclosed the number during his testimony in Google's defense at the Justice Department's antitrust trial in Washington. John Schmidtlein, Google's main litigator, visibly cringed when Murphy said the number, which was supposed to remain confidential.

Both Google and Apple had objected to revealing details publicly about their agreement. In a court filing last week, Google argued that revealing additional information about the deal "would unreasonably undermine Google's competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties."

schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: Apple will pay $25 million in back pay and civil penalties to settle a matter over the company's hiring practices under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. Apple has agreed to pay $6.75 million in civil penalties and establish an $18.25 million fund for back pay to eligible discrimination victims, the DOJ said in a release.

Apple was accused of not advertising positions that it wanted to fill through a federal program called Permanent Labor Certification Program or PERM, which allows U.S. companies to recruit workers who can become permanent U.S. residents after completing a number of requirements. The DOJ said that it believed that Apple followed procedures that were designed to favor current Apple employees holding temporary visas who wanted to become permanent employees. In particular, Apple was accused of not advertising positions on its external website and erecting hurdles such as requiring mailed paper applications, which the DOJ alleges means that some applicants to Apple jobs were not properly considered under federal law.

"These less effective recruitment procedures deterred U.S. applicants from applying and nearly always resulted in zero or very few mailed applications that Apple considered for PERM-related job positions, which allowed Apple to fill the positions with temporary visa holders," according to the settlement agreement between Apple and DOJ. Apple contests the accusation, according to the agreement, and says that it believes it was following the appropriate Department of Labor regulations. Apple also contests that any failures were the result of inadvertent errors and not discrimination, according to the agreement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: People who buy a Fire TV from Amazon are probably looking for a cheap and simple way to get an affordable 4K smart TV. When Amazon announced its first self-branded TVs in September 2021, it touted them as being a "great value." But owners of the devices will soon be paying for some of those savings in the form of more prominently displayed advertisements. Charlotte Maines, Amazon's director of Fire TV advertising, monetization, and engagement, detailed the new types of ads that Amazon is selling on Fire TVs. In a StreamTV Insider report from November 1, Amazon said the new ads will allow advertisers to reach an average of 155 million unique monthly viewers. Some of the changes targeting advertisers, like connecting display placement ads with specific in-stream video ads, seem harmless enough. Others could jeopardize the TV-watching experience for owners.

For example, Amazon is preparing to make Alexa with generative AI more useful for finding content on Fire TVs. This could help Alexa, which has struggled alongside other tech giants' voice assistants to generate significant revenue. Amazon gets money every time someone interacts with digital content through Alexa. However, the company is double-dipping on this idea by also tying ads to generative AI on Fire TVs. When users ask Alexa to help them find media with queries such as "play the show with the guy who plays the lawyer in Breaking Bad," they will see ads that are relevant to the search. [...] Finally, Amazon is adding "contextual sponsored tiles" that use machine learning to show ads based on whatever content genre or search term the Fire TV user is browsing.

Amazon Fire TV users will also start seeing banner ads on the device's home screen for things that have nothing to do with entertainment or media. This ad space was previously reserved for advertising media and entertainment, making the ads feel more relevant, at least. Amazon opening the ad space to more types of advertisers is similar to a move Google TV made early this year. The banner ads will occupy the first slot in the rotating hero area, which Amazon believes is the first thing Fire TV users see.

YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers is in full swing, leading to a wave of ad blocker uninstalls. 9to5Google reports: As Wired reports, this rollout has led to "hundreds of thousands" of uninstalls, not of YouTube but of ad blockers. The figures apparently come from various ad-blocking companies, where October saw a "record number" of people uninstalling ad blockers. Meanwhile, it also led to a record number of new installs, as many users looked to switch from one blocker to another in an effort to keep blocking ads.

One ad-blocking company, Ghostery, shared that 90% of users who completed a survey when uninstalling their ad blocker cited YouTube's changes as the reason. AdGuard told Wired that daily uninstalls were up for the entirety of October, spiking to 52,000 in a single day on October 18 as YouTube's notices started rolling out more widely. It was added that use of the Ghostery blocker is up 30% on Microsoft Edge, as some users have noticed that switching browsers at least temporarily lifts the blocking of their ad blocker. AdGuard, meanwhile, saw its paid subscription rise as some users reportedly saw success with containing to block ads using the tool.

Amazon doubled the number of junk ads to boost profits and deleted internal communications to thwart a federal antitrust probe, according to fresh details released by the US Federal Trade Commission in a less redacted complaint against the online retail giant Thursday. From a report: Amazon's founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos personally ordered executives to accept more ads, even ones the company had internally labeled as "defects," indicating they weren't relevant to user searches, according to the new version of the complaint. The FTC alleges that Amazon's increased use of ads boosts profits while it harms sellers and consumers, making it harder for shoppers to find products they are searching for. "We'd be crazy not to" increase the number of advertisements shown to shoppers," the FTC quoted Amazon executives as saying.

One executive compiled a number of the defective ads showing "buck urine" showing up in response to searches for "water bottles" or T-shirts for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team in response to queries for the Seattle Seahawks football team merchandise. In third quarter 2023 earnings announced last week, Amazon reported advertising revenue of $12.1 billion, making the company's ad unit its fastest-growing business. The company also deleted internal communications using the "disappearing message" feature of Signal and destroyed more than two years' worth of such communications, from June 2019 to at least early 2022, the FTC alleged.

Mozilla Foundation's decision to switch the search engine built into its Firefox browser to Yahoo from Google was a "failed" bet that degraded the user experience, the company's chief executive said. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Baker said Mozilla decided to switch to Yahoo's technology in 2014 after CEO Marissa Mayer took over and promised "to make a big bet on us."

"That bet failed," Baker said in a videotaped interview from 2022 played Wednesday in Google's defense during the Justice Department's antitrust trial. "The search experience that Yahoo was providing to Firefox users deteriorated." The Mozilla example -- the only situation in which a browser has switched the default search engine provider -- has been cited by both Google and the Justice Department to support their arguments in the case. [...] Yahoo agreed to pay Mozilla a minimum of $375 million -- more than the $276 million a year that Google was offering, Baker said. It also agreed to reduce the number of ads and offer less user tracking than Google, but over time Yahoo reneged on that and began showing more advertising, she added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The former head of search at Alphabet's Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was "getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company," according to emails shown at the Justice Department's landmark antitrust trial against the search giant. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google's search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue. But in February 2019, testimony at the antitrust trial revealed Tuesday, Google internally declared a "Code Yellow" amid concerns the company might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter.

As part of the emergency, which lasted for seven weeks, engineers from Google's search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed, according to the documents. Ben Gomes, Google's former head of search, was called by the company in its defense to show that it had made various advancements in search, particularly in mobile. However, cross examination by Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist revealed the tensions between Gomes' search team and its advertising counterparts. The questioning sought to undermine Google's contentions that its search team focuses solely on improving the user experience and has sometimes been pulled into the advertising side, where the Justice Department alleges Google has been able to raise prices without pushback.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: In 1994 the TV show Friends premiered, and its first season's high ratings made it the 8th most-popular show. The next year Microsoft released Windows 95 — and filmed a promotional video for it with 25-year-old Matthew Perry and 26-year-old Jennifer Aniston.

"They'll be taking you on an adventure in computing that takes place in the office of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates," explains the video's narrator, adding "Along the way, they meet a wacky bunch of propellor-heads.... And are introduced the top 25 features of Windows 95!"

It's a journey back in time. (At one point the video refers to Windows as the operating system "with tens of millions of users.") Their 30-minute segment — billed as "the world's first cyber sitcom" — appears in an hour-long video introducing revolutionary features like the new "Start" button. Also demonstrated in Excel are the new minimize and maximize "features" in "the upper right-side of the window". And the two actors marvel at the ability to type a filename that was longer than eight characters...

Watch for reminders that The Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide was filmed nearly three decades ago. When the desktop appears after waking from screensaver mode, Perry notes that there's "no messy DOS build-up." And later the video reminds viewers that Windows 95 is compatible "with DOS games like Flight Simulator." There's also a brand new feature called "Windows Explorer" (which is described as "File Manager on steroids"), as well as a new "Find" option, and a brand new icon named "My Computer". And near the end they pay a visit to the Microsoft Network — which was mostly a "walled garden" online service — described in the video as "your on-ramp to the information superhighway".

The video even explains how Windows 95 "uses the right mouse button for what Microsoft calls power users."

And by the end of it, Jennifer Anniston finds herself playing Space Cadet 3D pinball.

The creator economy is probably bigger than you think. The Washington Post reports it's "now a global industry valued at $250 billion, with tens of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of customers and its own trade association and work-credentialing programs." Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics... In the United States, the video giant YouTube estimated that roughly 390,000 full-time jobs last year were supported by its creators' work — four times the number of people employed by General Motors, America's biggest automaker...

This spring, analysts at Goldman Sachs said that 50 million people now work as creators around the world. The analysts expect the industry's "total addressable market," an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027. For comparison, the global revenue from video games, now at about $227 billion, is expected to climb to roughly $312 billion by 2027, analysts at the financial giant PwC estimated in June. YouTube's report estimated that its creators contributed $35 billion to [U.S.] gross domestic product last year, a figure that would rank the group's combined output ahead of U.S. furniture manufacturing but behind rail transportation, according to industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis....

Payments from advertisers to creators in the United States have more than doubled since 2019, to $5 billion, estimates from the market research firm Insider Intelligence show... Megan Pollock, a branding executive at Panasonic North America, said that the company now devotes about 10 percent of its marketing budget to creators and that she expects further increases amid a long-term shift away from traditional ad campaigns.
Other interesting details from the article:

• Last month people watched 53 million hours of video a day just on Twitch. But 74% of that went to the top 10,000 streamers (according to data from the analytics firm StreamElements).

• "Creators' incomes are determined by giant tech and advertising companies that can change the rules in an instant, and a single mistake can unravel their careers."

• When America's youth are asked what they want to be when they grow up, "Influencer" is now one of the most popular answers — ranking higher than "astronaut" and "professional athlete"

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Over at Computers Are Bad, J.B. Crawford [a senior professional services engineer at GitLab] offers a pretty epic takedown of the startup "Cooler Screens", which has replaced the formerly transparent cooler doors at Walgreens and other stores with six-foot, heat-generating 4K resolution digital screen doors that block the view of the merchandise that's behind them to enable IoT "contextual advertising".

"I find myself looking at a Walgreens cooler that just two years ago was covered in clear glass admitting direct inspection of which tall-boy teas were in stock," Crawford writes of his experience. "Today, it's an impenetrable black void. Some Walgreens employee has printed a sheet of paper, 'TEA' in 96-point Cambria, and taped it to the wall above the door...."

While Cooler Screens was first tested by Walgreens in 2018 and backed by Microsoft VC money, Cooler Screens is now suing Walgreens, claiming the pharmacy chain obstructed a nationwide rollout of the technology and demanded its removal from stores. Walgreens said in court documents that technical issues plagued the technology, making it difficult for customers to see what was available inside the coolers, the report said. According to Walgreens, the screens froze or went dark, showed incorrect products or prices, and even sparked and caught fire in some instances. Cooler Screens, on the other hand, blamed what it called Walgreens' aging and poorly maintained electrical and refrigeration infrastructure for the technical difficulties.

Still, Crawford notes that Kroger has announced it's adding Cooler Screens to 500 more of their stores, the result of a three-year pilot that apparently went better than Walgreens. But he isn't buying claims that "90%+ of consumers no longer prefer traditional glass cooler doors," and closes with a final observation, "I am nodding and appropriately chuckling when a stranger says 'remember when you could see through these?' as they fight against retail innovation to purchase one of the products these things were supposed to promote. You cannot say they aren't engaged, in a sense."
Earlier on Slashdot: Shoppers React as Grocers Replace Freezer Doors with Screens Playing Ads.

Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan on Thursday detailed challenges the search and advertising giant faces from smaller rivals, describing efforts to avoid becoming "the next road kill." From a report: Raghavan testified at the ongoing antitrust trial in the suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging Alphabet's Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the search-engine market to maintain monopoly power. Raghavan, asked about a 1998 article about Yahoo!'s dominance of search at the time, said he was acutely aware rivals from Expedia.com to Instagram to TikTok competed for users' attention.

"I feel a keen sense not to become the next road kill," said Raghavan, a senior vice president at Google who reports to chief executive Sundar Pichai. Raghavan said Google had some 8,000 engineers and product managers working on search, with about 1,000 involved in search quality. Raghavan's description of Google struggling to stay relevant clashed with the Justice Department's depiction of a behemoth that broke antitrust law to retain dominance of online search and some aspects of advertising, including paying an estimated $10 billion annually to smartphone makers and wireless carriers to be the default search engine on devices. Google's share of the search engine market is near 90%.

Brian Steinberg reports via Variety: So-called "pause ads" -- they only turn up a few seconds after a viewer has decided to halt the programming, and not every time one does -- are seeing new movement in the streaming world, with the format appearing more frequently on Hulu since July, according to Josh Mattison, senior vice president of revenue management and operations for Disney Advertising. Pause ads are also in motion in venues such as NBCUniversal's Peacock and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max.

As more media companies seek to goose subscriber rates by offering cheaper ad-supported versions of their streaming services, this type of commercial may become more handy. One of the main attractions of streaming, after all, is that it boasts fewer traditional commercials than its linear TV counterpart. The industry hopes that a pause ad -- other "out of pod" commercial experiences are also in development -- can appear on screen without upsetting a subscriber who gets viscerally roiled by the prospect of a glut of typical TV spots.

Others have also found ways to work ads into the moments when streaming fans come to a stopping point. NBCUniversal's Peacock launched with pause ads, says Peter Blacker, executive vice president of streaming and data products for NBCUniversal's ad-sales division, while Warner Bros. Discovery's Max introduced them in 2022, says Ryan Gould, head of digital ad sales and client partnerships at the company. No one has been holding back on the new format. Hulu has experimented with pauses since at least 2018, and an early version of the idea surfaced last decade when Coca-Cola and Universal Pictures tested concepts with ReplayTV, an early backer of digital video recording technology. Coke, which once used the slogan "the pause that refreshes" to great effect, and Charmin, the Procter & Gamble toilet tissue that can offer succor during many breaks in TV viewing, tested the format with Hulu in 2019.

"In 2023, the state of our digital privacy is: Very Creepy." That's the verdict from Mozilla's first-ever "Annual Consumer Creep-o-Meter," which attempts to set benchmarks for digital privacy and identify trends: Since 2017, Mozilla has published 15 editions of *Privacy Not Included, our consumer tech buyers guide. We've reviewed over 500 gadgets, apps, cars, and more, assessing their security features, what data they collect, and who they share that data with. In 2023, we compared our most recent findings with those of the past five years. It quickly became clear that products and companies are collecting more personal data than ever before — and then using that information in shady ways...

Products are getting more secure, but also a lot less private. More companies are meeting Mozilla's Minimum Security Standards like using encryption and providing automatic software updates. That's good news. But at the same time, companies are collecting and sharing users' personal data like never before. And that's bad news. Many companies now view their hardware or software as a means to an end: collecting that coveted personal data for targeted advertising and training AI. For example: The mental health app BetterHelp shares your data with advertisers, social media platforms, and sister companies. The Japanese car manufacturer Nissan collects a wide range of information, including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information — but doesn't specify how.

An increasing number of products can't be used offline. In the past, the privacy conscious could always buy a connected device but turn off connectivity, making it "dumb." That's no longer an option in many cases. The number of connected devices that require apps and can't be used offline are increasing. This trend, coupled with the first, means it's harder and harder to keep your data private.
Privacy policies also need improvement. "Legalese, ambiguity, and policies that sprawl across multiple documents and URLs are the status quo. And it's getting worse, not better. Companies use these policies as a shield, not an actual resource for consumers." They note that Toyota has more than 10 privacy policy documents, and that it would actually take five hours to read all the privacy documents the Meta Quest Pro VR headset.

In the end they advise opting out of data collection when possible, enabling security features, and "If you're not comfortable with a product's privacy, don't buy it. And, speak up. Over the years, we've seen companies respond to consumer demand for privacy, like when Apple reformed app tracking and Zoom made end-to-end encryption a free feature."

You can also take a quiz that calculates your own privacy footprint (based on whether you're using consumer tech products like the Apple Watch, Nintendo Switch, Nook, or Telegram). Mozilla's privacy advocates award the highest marks to privacy-protecting products like Signal, Sonos' SL Speakers, and the Pocketbook eReader (an alternative to Amazon's Kindle. (Although 100% of the cars reviewed by Mozilla "failed to meet our privacy and security standards.")

The graphics on the site help make its point. As you move your mouse across the page, the cartoon eyes follow its movement...

"Twenty phone companies may soon have all their voice calls blocked by US carriers," reports Ars Technica, "because they didn't submit real plans for preventing robocalls on their networks." The 20 carriers include a mix of US-based and foreign voice service providers that submitted required "robocall mitigation" plans to the Federal Communications Commission about two years ago. The problem is that some of the carriers' submissions were blank pages and others were bizarre images or documents that had no relation to robocalls. The strange submissions, according to FCC enforcement orders issued Monday, included "a .PNG file depicting an indiscernible object," a document titled "Windows Printer Test Page," an image "that depicted the filer's 'Taxpayer Profile' on a Pakistani government website," and "a letter that stated: 'Unfortunately, we do not have such a documents.'"

Monday's FCC announcement said the agency's Enforcement Bureau issued orders demanding that "20 non-compliant companies show cause within 14 days as to why the FCC should not remove them from the database for deficient filings." The orders focus on the certification requirements and do not indicate whether these companies carry large amounts of robocall traffic. Each company will be given "an opportunity to cure any deficiencies in its robocall mitigation program description or explain why its certification is not deficient." After the October 30 deadline, the companies could be removed from the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database.

Removal from the database would oblige other phone companies to block all of their calls.

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.