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Many users have reported seeing a rather worrying notification when they load up Google Chrome, which reveals that Chrome will start showing them ads that rely on data from your browsing history.  This immediately rang alarm bells for users as it’s essentially accessing your private log of online browsing activity to show you ads specific to you, without being clear about how often your history will be accessed.  Many users, as well as experts on internet privacy, see this as a pretty huge violation of privacy by not giving users the ability to give their informed consent.  What’s Google been up to? Simply put, Chrome takes the accumulated personal data, profiling users, and flagging up topics of interest, basing it on the most recent weeks of browsing history. When you visit a website within Chrome, it can then ask you to personalize the ads presented to you while you’re on the page. Google claims that it shares […]

YouTube may be held hostage by its own TikTok competitor, Shorts, as staffers are worried that the short-form content may cannibalise its long-term videos, which have been the key driver of views for almost two decades.  The Financial Times reports that YouTube’s ad revenue may have improved recently, but has been in a downward slide year over year for three consecutive quarters. A few years ago many social video platforms were concerned about the rapid rise of TikTok, leading YouTube to introduce Shorts.  The short-form video content on YouTube is still relatively new, and the company is still figuring out how to reap more financial gains from Shorts. Longer, more traditional, YouTube videos show more ads per video, but with shorter clips steadily taking over our feeds, content creators are uploading fewer longer videos.  Damned if you do … A few friends of mine who are modestly successful content creators on YouTube have said a few times […]