Ethics of Advertising

Is it healthy for start-ups to spend so much money on user acquisition?

Back in early October, Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of Social Capital, the erstwhile venture capital firm turned technology holding company, penned…

November 26, 2018

Sheryl Sandberg is right: metered access doesn’t scale

Forbes published an exclusive interview last week with Brian Acton, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, that produced a number…

October 1, 2018

Unpacking Facebook’s upcoming changes to Custom Audiences

Starting in March -- the month that news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke -- Facebook announced a series of…

How mobile gaming companies are dealing with GDPR

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation transitioned into the enforcement phase on May 25th (the regulation was originally adopted in April…

Social media platforms don’t sell user data. No one would buy it.

One of the more frustrating and resilient conspiracy theories circulated in the wake of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica revelations…

Facebook triumphed in Q1 earnings despite privacy concerns. Can anything slow it down?

Facebook reported its earnings last Wednesday, February 25th, beating consensus expectations on almost every metric. The highlights: DAUs grew to…

Will Apple redefine mobile advertising with SKAdNetwork?

On March 29th, Apple introduced a new set of APIs within its iOS 11.3 update called SKAdNetwork. The APIs are…

Algorithms, Ad Targeting, and Democracy – a Conversation with Dr. Sandra Matz

In the third installment of the not-at-all-regular Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Dr. Sandra Matz of Columbia University about ad targeting, legislating…

Algorithms and Safe Harbor: What will regulation for Facebook look like?

In 1996, in an attempt to regulate pornographic material on the internet, the US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act.…