The prevalence of Denial of Future Attacks (DoFAs) in our information landscape is primarily attributed to the combination of media dynamics and their underlying business models. The way journalists are incentivized plays a crucial role; their focus often lies more on garnering attention than driving actual change. A telling example is the nature of what's considered 'breaking news' today, especially in the context of the constant stream of notifications on our smartphones. This attention-driven approach

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I work in marketing, for my sins. This is mostly why I’m so entirely down on the marketing industry and many of the people who work in it. I also happen to have an MSc in psychology – actual psychology! – with a focus on behaviour change. On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex. Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.

We don’t know how many media outlets have been run out of existence because of brand safety technology, nor how many media outlets will never be able to monetize critical news coverage because the issues important to their communities are marked as “unsafe.”

Text file You can provide a simple text file that contains one URL per line. The text file must follow these guidelines: The text file must have one URL per line. The URLs cannot contain embedded new lines. You must fully specify URLs, including the http. Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB (52,428,800 bytes). If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and add each one separately. The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box). The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs. The text file should contain no header or footer information. If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap text file using gzip to reduce your bandwidth requirement. You can name the text file anything you wish. Please check to make sure that your URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs You should upload the text file to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl and make sure that you don't list URLs in the text file that are located in a higher-level directory. Sample text file entries are shown below. http://www.example.com/catalog?item=1 http://www.example.com/catalog?item=11

Table 2 - Energy efficiencies of mobile networks

Therefore, we take the 17% of app traffic associated with ATS found by Vallina-Rodriguez et al., (2016) as an upper boundary, also because in some video apps lots of advertisements are shown, and as a lower boundary we assume 10%, to use a conservative range for the carbon footprint of unwanted data-use.

We assumed that the electricity use is distributed all over Europe. In the calculation we used the actual European electricity grid mix from 2019.

To compensate for 3 to 8 Mt CO2 emissions, 160 to 410 million trees need to grow for one year or between 60 and 150 million PV panels need to be installed to replace the average European electricity production.

In this study we define the unwanted data-use by smartphone apps as the network data (both cellular and Wi-Fi) used to transfer the data collected by third-party advertisement and tracking services (ATS) in smartphone apps to the third-party servers. As approximately 60% of the consumers indicate that they would turn off third-party tracking, 60% of the network data used by ATS is qualified as unwanted.

Smartphone apps collect more user data (also called tracking) than most consumers prefer. Besides privacy risks, the collection of user data also results in a carbon footprint as sending this user data to third parties and showing personalised advertisements consumes network data. When the user tracking is unwanted, also the consumption of network data for tracking is unwanted.

This is the result of using high and outdated energy-use assumptions for various access modes – for example, 0.9 kWh/GB for “mobile” compared to more recent peer-reviewed estimates of 0.1-0.2 kWh/GB for 4G mobile in 2019.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Over the years, the machinery of targeted advertising has frequently been used for exploitation, discrimination, and harm. The ability to target people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, or ability allows discriminatory ads for jobs, housing, and credit. Targeting based on credit history—or characteristics systematically associated with it— enables predatory ads for high-interest loans. Targeting based on demographics, location, and political affiliation helps purveyors of politically motivated disinformation and voter suppression. All kinds of behavioral targeting increase the risk of convincing scams.

The power to target is the power to discriminate. By definition, targeted ads allow advertisers to reach some kinds of people while excluding others. A targeting system may be used to decide who gets to see job postings or loan offers just as easily as it is to advertise shoes. 

You should have a right to present different aspects of your identity in different contexts. If you visit a site for medical information, you might trust it with information about your health, but there’s no reason it needs to know what your politics are. Likewise, if you visit a retail website, it shouldn’t need to know whether you’ve recently read up on treatment for depression. FLoC erodes this separation of contexts, and instead presents the same behavioral summary to everyone you interact with.

We also believe that in order to democratize audio and achieve Spotify’s mission of enabling a million creators to live off of their art, we must work to enable greater choice for creators. This choice becomes increasingly important as audio becomes even easier to create and share.

I asked Seyal if Pinterest had ever considered a feature that let users mark a life event complete. Canceled. Finished. Done. “We would have to have a system that thinks about things on an event level, so we could deliver on the promise,” Seyal said. “Right now we just use relevance as a measure.” But had Pinterest considered that, in the long run, people might be more inclined to use the app if it could become a clean space for them when they needed it to be, a corner of the internet uncluttered with grief?

So on a blindingly sunny day in October 2019, I met with Omar Seyal, who runs Pinterest’s core product. I said, in a polite way, that Pinterest had become the bane of my online existence.“We call this the miscarriage problem,” Seyal said, almost as soon as I sat down and cracked open my laptop. I may have flinched. Seyal’s role at Pinterest doesn’t encompass ads, but he attempted to explain why the internet kept showing me wedding content. “I view this as a version of the bias-of-the-majority problem. Most people who start wedding planning are buying expensive things, so there are a lot of expensive ad bids coming in for them. And most people who start wedding planning finish it,” he said. Similarly, most Pinterest users who use the app to search for nursery decor end up using the nursery. When you have a negative experience, you’re part of the minority, Seyal said.

But brand safety requires us to do two things: 1.) keep our ads away from hate speech and 2.) fund our news ecosystem. When you know your vendors are failing at both, can you afford to look away?