Despite years of advance warning, and an already prevailing paradigm shift towards heightened user safety and explicit consent - several web properties have done little to prepare themselves for the new era of locked-down browser security. In fact I’ve almost noted a prevalence of certain websites doubling down on their misguided stance - and putting in place all manner of ad-blocker alerts pop-ups and barriers.

Apple Safari is now a 3rd Party Ad Blocking Analysis Blocking

We’ve known about Apple’s incoming iOS and general operating ecosystem changes for a while now - and have reported the key points in our fairly recent Privacy Details and Tracking Permissions article. Apple is very much doing the right thing for customers and customer protections here in fully properly incorporating ’Explicit Consent’, and privacy first principles into every part of its operation.

For far too long unscrupulous Advertisers, Trackers and Platforms...

Facebook dropped roughly $123 billion in share value / market capitalisation after disappointing earnings for Q2 this year were revealed. Much of this has to do with the new GDPR regulations - which restrict what Facebook can legitimately do for advertisers and sponsors, but also there seems to be a noticeable backlash following revelations that Facebook sold on customers’ privacy details and contact lists to various suspect parties - including groups of supposed Russian Hacker types.

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With more and more browsers now baking stringent Ad-blocking functionality directly into their core operation - in particular Apple Safari and Google Chrome per recent updates; and Ad-blocking Apps and extensions being ever more clever at spotting and screening out different types of ads - the only way to continue business as usual is to use something like Affino - which bakes its native ad-handling functionality into its core page delivery mechanics - making the ad parts indiscernible from the...

My last post was about the dangers of spoofing / malware / ID theft - and a major reason why this is happening so much is that too many companies are recklessly and carelessly exploiting customer details and data - in fact various different types of your personal digital signature and ID. You for example order a pizza online - and are forced to fill in a mobile phone field - meaning forever after you have to fend off myriad call centres up and down the country or indeed on other continents - ...

In these past few weeks I have witnessed or experienced 4 significant spoofing attempts / events. Most of us will have caught the news about over 1 million Android users inadvertently downloading a fake version of the WhatsApp chat app. I’ve received a fake Adobe tax refund email, several fake Amazon SMS delivery notifications (with suspicious ’preview’ pop-up links), as well as encountered what I believe are a couple of spoof ’Sign into iTunes Store’ pop-ups on my...

Once more the dark side of advertising rears its ugly head, as the FCC fines Verizon Wireless $1.35 million for its ongoing use of unsolicited and covert ’SuperCookies’ tracking technology, fully intended to follow its customers’ movements right across the Internet. The new ruling likely mandates that both wireless and fixed broadband providers must get permission from users before tracking their behaviour online in such a manner.

The SuperCoookies being deployed are ...

Next Tuesday 17th March at the PPA, Affino is leading a briefing and discussion on the impact of privacy tools like Ghostery. Using such utilities on browsers, consumers can effectively turn off all 3rd party cookies, many of which publishers and media organisations are currently relying on to drive revenues via advertising, profiling, personalisation, search, lead generation, promotions and media serving amongst other third party services.

Our CEO Markus Karlsson alongside CCO ...

This all started with Spanish Citizen’s Mario Costeja González discontent over a Google Search Result on his name which referred to an article featuring information about the repossession and auction of his home some years earlier. He argued that this was ’out-of-date’ information which was an affront to his ’Dignity’ and his ’Right to Privacy’. He argued that he had a ’Right to be forgotten’ and that Google should be made to remove ...