Private Offerings in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Targeted Advertising

Social media platforms, as well as the internet more broadly, have fundamentally altered many aspects of modern life. In particular, platforms’ targeted advertising mechanisms have revolutionized how companies reach consumers by providing advertisers more effective tools for reaching consumers and by tailoring content to consumers’ individual interests. Advertising, in many respects, has always been targeted—it has always sought to reach and influence a certain set of consumers. Today’s targeted advertising, however, allows advertisers to influence consumer behavior on an increasingly granular and intimate level, further skewing the power imbalance between advertisers and consumers. This new dynamic, together with changes to advertising rules for private securities offerings, creates a regulatory gap: should issuers be allowed to promote private offerings through targeted advertising on social media? This Note examines that gap and considers how contemporary targeted advertising mechanisms interact with the law of private securities, which has long restricted issuers’ use of advertising in promoting private offerings. These and other restrictions reflect an understanding that private securities are more volatile (and, as a result, often yield higher returns) than public securities. In 2013, though, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission” or “SEC”) lifted a longstanding ban on the use of general solicitations for private offerings, paving the way for issuers to employ widely disseminated advertisements to solicit investors. But the Commission did not anticipate—and could not have anticipated—the ways in which social media and “surveillance capitalism” would change advertising, and the current regulatory regime does not contemplate how targeted advertising fits into the private offering landscape. With the ability not only to target but also to influence specific consumers, private securities issuers can wield new power with targeted advertising. Consumers may understandably be enticed by promises of high returns, and advertisements for private offerings can now appear in consumers’ social media newsfeed alongside personal and professional content. More importantly, targeted advertising algorithms curate personalized content with the goal of imperceptibly and gradually changing consumer thinking, perhaps leading a user to finally click on an advertisement she once scrolled past. While such a dynamic may be acceptable, and even desirable, with respect to material goods and services, it raises complicated and pressing concerns in the context of private securities offerings. This Note proposes modifications to the private securities rules that would prohibit the use of targeted advertising in private offerings—a change that would adequately remediate the harms posed and provide clarity to the many stakeholders involved

Improving the robustness and privacy of HTTP cookie-based tracking systems within an affiliate marketing context : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

E-commerce activities provide a global reach for enterprises large and small. Third parties generate visitor traffic for a fee; through affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, keyword bidding and through organic search, amongst others. Therefore, improving the robustness of the underlying tracking and state management techniques is a vital requirement for the growth and stability of e-commerce. In an inherently stateless ecosystem such as the Internet, HTTP cookies have been the de-facto tracking vector for decades. In a previous study, the thesis author exposed circumstances under which cookie-based tracking system can fail, some due to technical glitches, others due to manipulations made for monetary gain by some fraudulent actors. Following a design science research paradigm, this research explores alternative tracking vectors discussed in previous research studies within a cross-domain tracking environment. It evaluates their efficacy within current context and demonstrates how to use them to improve the robustness of existing tracking techniques. Research outputs include methods, instantiations and a privacy model artefact based on information seeking behaviour of different categories of tracking software, and their resulting privacy intrusion levels. This privacy model provides clarity and is useful for practitioners and regulators to create regulatory frameworks that do not hinder technological advancement, rather they curtail privacy-intrusive tracking practices on the Internet. The method artefacts are instantiated as functional prototypes, available publicly on Internet, to demonstrate the efficacy and utility of the methods through live tests. The research contributes to the theoretical knowledge base through generalisation of empirical findings and to the industry by problem solving design artefacts

Data Scams

Targeting platforms like Google and Facebook are usually seen as presenting tradeoffs between utility and privacy. This Article identifies and describes a different, non-privacy cost of targeting platforms: they make it easier for malicious actors to scam others. They do this by making it easier for scammers to reach the most promising victims, hide from law-enforcement authorities and others, and develop better scams. Technology offers potential solutions, since the same data and targeting tools that enable scams could help detect and prevent them, though neither platforms nor law-enforcement officials have both the incentives and expertise needed to develop and deploy those solutions. Moreover, these scams may illustrate a broader class of problems from targeting that go beyond utility versus privacy, suggesting that more aggressive interventions may be needed

PUBLISHING FAKE NEWS FOR PROFIT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED AS WIRE FRAUD

PUBLISHING FAKE NEWS FOR PROFIT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED AS WIRE FRAU

Challenge of guarding online privacy: role of privacy seals, government regulations and technological solutions

The state of privacy in the 21st century is a worldwide concern, given the Internet’s global reach. The privacy violation on the internet is a significant problem and internet users have a right to adequate privacy. New e-business technologies have increased the ability of online merchants to collect, monitor, target, profile, and even sell personal information about consumers to third parties. Governments, business houses and employers collect data and monitor people, but their practices often threaten an individual’s privacy. Because vast amount of data can be collected on the Internet and due to global ramifications, citizens worldwide have expressed concerns over increasing cases of privacy violations. Several privacy groups, all around the world, have joined hands to give a boost to privacy movement. Consumer privacy, therefore, has attracted the widespread attention of regulators across the globe. With the European Directive already in force, “trust seals” and “government regulations” are the two leading forces pushing for more privacy disclosures. Of course, privacy laws vary throughout the globe but, unfortunately, it has turned out to be the subject of legal contention between the European Union and the United States. The EU has adopted very strict laws to protect its citizens’ privacy, in sharp contrast, to ‘lax-attitude’ and ‘self-regulated’ law of the US. For corporations that collect and use personal information, now ignoring privacy legislative and regulatory warning signs can prove to be a costly mistake. An attempt has been made in this paper to summarize the privacy legislation prevalent in Australia, Canada, the US, the EU, India, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. It is expected that a growing number of countries will adopt privacy laws to foster e-commerce. Accountability for privacy and personal data protection needs to be a joint effort among governments, privacy commissioners, organizations and individuals themselves

ISPs and Ad Networks Against Botnet Ad Fraud

Botnets are a serious threat on the Internet and require huge resources to be thwarted. ISPs are in the best position to fight botnets and there are a number of recently proposed initiatives that focus on how ISPs should detect and remediate bots. However, it is very expensive for ISPs to do it alone and they would probably welcome some external funding. Among others, botnets severely affect ad networks (ANs), as botnets are increasingly used for ad fraud. Thus, ANs have an economic incentive, but they are not in the best position to fight botnet ad fraud. Consequently, ANs might be willing to subsidize the ISPs to do so. We provide a game-theoretic model to study the strategic behavior of ISPs and ANs and we identify the conditions under which ANs are likely to solve the problem of botnet ad fraud by themselves and those under which the AN will subsidize the ISP to achieve this goal. Our analytical and numerical results show that the optimal strategy depends on the ad revenue loss of the ANs due to ad fraud and the number of bots participating in ad fraud