By AJ Dellinger

Ad-blocking tool Ghostery suffered from a pretty impressive, self-inflicted screwup Friday when the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email, revealing their addresses to all recipients.

Fittingly, the inadvertent data exposure came in the form of an email updating Ghostery users about the company’s data collection policies. The ad blocker was sending out the message to affirm its commitment to user privacy as the European Union’s digital privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), goes into effect.

The email arrived in inboxes with the subject line “Happy GDPR Day — We’ve got you covered!” In the body of the email, the company informed users, “We at Ghostery hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to users’ privacy, and have implemented measures to reinforce security and ensure compliance with all aspects of this new legislation.”

What Ghostery likely didn’t intend to do was immediately expose all of its users. CCed to the email were hundreds of other recipients, their emails all readily viewable to others receiving the message. Ghostery users took to social media to complain about the exposure.

Gizmodo spoke to three Ghostery users who received the GDPR email from the company and had their emails revealed in the CC line of the message. All three confirmed that they had yet to receive any follow up from Ghostery regarding the situation. Gizmodo also reached out to Ghostery but did not receive a reply.

Amazingly, all three users said no one had replied to the email yet, sparing the hundreds of other recipients from being caught in an endless reply allpocalypse. “In one of the most stunning displays of humanity I have ever seen, no one has yet reply-all’d with a snarky comment,” Twitter user Linguica said in a DM.

Most of the users who spoke about the incident said they would continue using Ghostery. Dan Previte, a web developer from Chicago and Ghostery user, told Gizmodo he would continue using the tool but noted, “It does make me think their dev team is maybe not great at protecting my personal information. So I’d be less likely to allow them to collect usage data or something.” One user going by /home/$USER said they had just signed up for Ghostery Friday to run some tests with the tool and has already dropped it.

While the email fuck up was likely a simple mistake, Ghostery, which blocks trackers scattered on websites that collect personal data from users, has come under fire for some of its practices in the past. For nearly a year, the company faced criticism for selling anonymized user data to businesses. It has since changed to a business model that sells analytics data about ads and offers an affiliate marketing program to users.

Feature Image Credit:  Screenshot: YouTube

By AJ Dellinger

Sourced from GIZMODO

By Om Malik

Every afternoon, during lunch, I open up YouTube, and I find myself marveling at the sheer dumbness of its recommendations. Despite having all this viewing data of mine, world’s second most popular search engine is dumb as a brick. It shows me propaganda channels from two ends of the political spectrum. It surfaces some inane celebrity videos. It dredges up the worst material for me — considering I usually like watch science videos, long conversations and interviews, and photography-focused educational videos.

YouTube, assumes that like its billion-plus audience I might be pleased with the lowest common denominator. And why pick on YouTube. It is the general state of the Internet. Another service which should now be able to understand the qualitative merits of a piece of information is Instagram. Instead of trying to surface new, exciting and artistic, it manages to surface the more predictable photos. If I like a few watch photos, it surfaces pictures of watches in my feed, even when they are not a primary interest. The algorithms lack a depth of understanding and context, despite knowing so much.

No matter where I go on the Internet, I feel like I am trapped in the “feed,” held down by algorithms that are like axes trying to make bespoke shirts out of silk. And no one illustrates it better than Facebook and Twitter, two more services that should know better, but they don’t. Fake news, unintelligent information and radically dumb statements are getting more attention than what matters. The likes, retweets, re-posts are nothing more than steroids for noise. Even when you are sarcastic in your retweets or re-shares, the system has the understanding of a one-year-old monkey baby: it is a vote on popularity.

Thumbs down, a feature that should have more adoption and utility, doesn’t work, because it doesn’t bring the dopamine rush of the like. I mean, to dislike something, you have to think. As a result, with every day that passes, the noise increases. What is essential, remains buried in the background, looking, seeking and praying for attention.

There are many reasons why feeds are closing in on us — the primary being that most of these companies have created systems that are mostly one size fits all solution, designed to serve the broadest set of users. Then they are layered with personalization algorithms that are rudimentary.

Whether it is Facebook or Twitter, they need to create a lowest common denominator, which keeps people hooked on their services. The more they are hooked, more opportunities to show them advertising and thus make more money. The entire system is designed to micro-dose us with dopamine, rewarding every action with another hit.

On top of that, there are fiscal pressures on algorithms. After all, those who encode these algorithms are human — flawed as you and me. They take orders from those who tell them to make these algorithms to bring in as much revenue as possible — to keep growing and keeping the Wall Street happy.

Whether we like or not, for now, advertising is the only accepted currency of the web. The modern Internet, thanks to the duopoly of Facebook and Google, has become an advertising-monetized attention economy. The core tenet of this philosophy: “most” attention is “more” valuable.

It is no different than the old media — most prominent magazines (Vogue, People, Time) got the highest CPM. Whatever was the biggest TV network got a premium for its audience size. And the biggest audience translates into the highest possible chance of return on advertising dollars – and as a result, it is hardly surprising that big spending ad-companies keeping going back to the big two.

Lost in the mists of Internet time, is the fact that it was Wired magazine’s HotWired came up with the idea of using banners for advertising. Wired was looking for something simple and expedient — something the advertising industry would be able to grok. In the old media world, more reach you had, more you could charge. You could argue that the “ad-banner” was Internet’s first deadly sin. As the web grew, no one searched for better ways to pay for information on the Internet. Instead, folks spent most of their creative energies to increase advertising dollars and built a big ecosystem around it. And Google and Facebook have created the best ad-delivery platforms, more significant than any TV network or magazine in the past.

Like old media before, today’s platforms at the core were designed to focus on the “most” and not the best. For instance, Google’s page rank system rewarded pages with most links. More popular you were, more you were rewarded. It is now forgotten, but search engine optimization (SEO) and manipulation was a way to get on the front page of Google. Since Google’s front page was the oil well of attention, no one was surprised when headlines were written for the attention of Google crawler.

Many have forgotten, but services like Digg helped popularize the idea of what I call intellectual spam. Headlines, followed by vapid content, meant to attract the likes. Against such a backdrop, a decade ago, we all assumed that the rise of the personal web, shaped by individual data would result in signals that will help us dampen the noise. We thought that our systems would get smarter, learning from our behavior, and we would be able to separate signal from noise. And this would allow us to focus our attention on the meaningful and essential.

Unfortunately, the reality of capitalism and turned that dream into a big giant popularity contest, shaped by crude tools – likes, hearts, retweets, and re-shares. We have created systems that boost noise and weaken signals. Every time I tune into news and all I see is noise rising to the top. Whether it is YouTube or Instagram — all you see are memes that are candy-colored candy, mean to keep us hooked.

The question then is who will save us from the feed? It has to be someone whose principal business is not monetizing their customers by selling their data and advertising. For now, I think Apple is one of the companies which can do something about this. Apple News is a credible application, but it needs to embrace the web and become more open. But I will take what I can get – at least it is not showing me some dumb videos and articles that only make my doctors richer!

Photo by Priscillia du Preez, via Unsplash

By Om Malik

Sourced from OM

By Taylor Bennett

Imagine landing on a brand’s website and, instead of scrolling through pages of content digging for information, you have the ability to ask it anything you want to know. The site responds with audible answers or text, takes you where you want to go and provides a 100% interactive experience. Now imagine the site speaks in the voice of the brand, adding elements that create an emotional connection. Humor, sincerity, knowledge — whatever the brand personality is, the site will speak it.

This scenario is no longer just a figment of our imaginations. According to the Pew Research Center, digital voice assistants are used by 46% of Americans. And it’s safe to say that, by now, we have all at least had an interaction with voice or artificial intelligence technology. How is this evolution impacting the ability of agencies to develop brands and communicate them on behalf of their clients?

Taking Brand Personification A Step Further

IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and smaller technology partners recognize the importance of brand personification — in addition to giving their bots custom names, each voice bot has a personality. Today, these tech companies are enabling commercial marketing agencies to gain access to the tools to distinctly personify their clients’ brands through voice. Why? Based on my experience, personifying a brand and giving it human qualities will facilitate a better connection with the company — ultimately leading to a dialogue and the creation of a loyal relationship.

With this in mind, agencies are coupling their expertise in building brands from the inside out (connecting with a company’s values, goals and customers) with experts in the field of technology to present not only how brands should be communicated but how the brand can actually communicate.

The difference is that, instead of developing copy and content intended to be read or seen (on websites, billboards, brochures, etc.), agencies are crafting conversational content by anticipating what the viewer or listener will want to know or see. The beauty of voice technology is that it learns from each interaction and becomes smarter and more resourceful, ultimately developing content on its own. As a result, customers begin to understand who the brand is instead of what the brand is, and agencies can formulate even more effective marketing strategies and values around it.

Time To Get On Board

Like all technology, voice is growing at a rapid pace — and I believe it’s a must-have technology in the new digital age of branding. In October 2017, our company MESH, along with software development firm Not Rocket Science (NRS), announced the creation of Branded BotsTM, artificial intelligence (AI) applications for businesses and consumers. Our bot solutions provide a natural language interface between a business and its customers, an interface that not only provides an efficient and knowledgeable presence to represent the business but also operates within the framework of the existing brand personality. The bot technology allows us to continue to develop streamlined external communications for customers, giving them data and information on the company with a dose of the brand’s personality. By building back-end intelligence, essentially, a virtual person is created — providing a consistent channel from which to get information.

Global companies are getting on board with this idea. In fact, Publicis Groupe announced a partnership with Microsoft for Marcel and in January 2018, JPMorgan Chase announced a partnership with VaynerMedia as the institution’s agency of record for voice.

For brands and marketers looking to incorporate voice in their engagement strategy, consider the preferred effect it should have on the business — from internal benefits, such as streamlining operations through software integration, to augmentation of the workforce. For example, the bot MESH is developing for our agency focuses on software integration and operations, linking together our project management, time tracking and CRM systems. Voice can also be impactful externally, enhancing consumers’ encounters with a brand, sharing information and updates with a dose of personality.

After the effect of voice is determined, a marketer needs to determine how audiences will interact with voice technology, with most interacting similarly to how they interact with Alexa Skills in their home. They will search for answers and updates, however, the engagement and content provided will be centered around the brand and the products, and the industry and services of the organization.

Lastly, a brand must determine where voice will be most effective — which is centered around a consumer or business-to-business (B2B) client developing a deeper engagement and relationship with the brand. The bot acts as a consultant to the customer, with content that is not created to sell, but instead to inform, educate and give a glimpse of the brand personality through the tone of the voice. Additionally, marketers today are (and should be) analyzing all brand engagement, which is especially helpful for voice technology as it can learn through interaction, analyze itself and fill in the blanks to information it might not have had but will need in the future.

Voice and AI are more than new media — they are media that brands and agencies alike must leverage to not only be successful but also relevant in the years to come.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Taylor Bennett

CEO and Chief Creative Director at MESH, a 15+ year award winning creative and strategic agency serving Fortune 500’s to smart start ups.

Sourced from Forbes