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Tag: advertising

  • Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram

    Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram

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    However, 3,000 ads for “AI girlfriends” and 1,100 containing “NSFW” were live on April 23, according to Meta’s ad library.

    WIRED’s initial review found that Hush, an AI girlfriend app downloaded more than 100,000 times from Google’s Play store, had published 1,700 ads across Meta platforms, several of which promise “NSFW” chats and “secret photos” from a range of lifelike female characters, anime women, and cartoon animals.

    One shows an AI woman locked into medieval prison stocks by the neck and wrists, pledging, “Help me, I will do anything for you.” Another ad, targeted using Meta’s technology at men aged 18 to 65, features an anime character and the text “Want to see more of NSFW pics?”

    Several of the 980 Meta ads WIRED found for “personalized AI companion” app Rosytalk promise around-the-clock chats with very-young-looking AI-generated women. They used tags including “#barelylegal,” “#goodgirls,” and “teens.” Rosytalk also ran 990 ads under at least nine brand names on Meta platforms, including Rosygirl, Rosy Role Play Chat, and AI Chat GPT.

    At least 13 other apps for AI “girlfriends” have promoted similar services in Meta ads, including “nudifying” features that allow a user to “undress” their AI girlfriend and download the images. A handful of the girlfriend ads had already been removed for violating Meta’s advertising standards. “Undressing” apps have also been marketed on mainstream social platforms, according to social media research firm Graphika, and on LinkedIn, the Daily Mail recently reported.

    Some users of so-called AI companions say they can help combat loneliness, with others reporting them feeling like a real partner. Not all of the ads found by WIRED promote only titillation, with some also suggesting that an explicit AI chatbot could provide emotional support. “Talk to anyone! You’re not alone!” reads one of Hush’s ads on Meta platforms.

    Carolina Are, an innovation fellow researching social media censorship at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in the UK, says human sex workers feed the same needs and desires as racy AI girlfriend apps and also cater to lonely and disabled people. But Meta makes it extremely difficult for them to advertise on its platforms, she says.

    “When people are trying to work through and profit off their own body, they are forbidden,” says Are, who has helped sex workers reactivate lost and unfairly suspended accounts on Meta platforms. “While AI companies mostly powered by bros that exploit images already out there are able to do that.”

    Are says the sexually suggestive AI girlfriends remind her of the unsophisticated and generic early days of internet porn. “Sex workers engage with their customers, subscribers, and followers in a way that is more personalized,” she says. “This is a lot of work and emotional labor beyond the sharing of nude images.”

    Limited information is available about how the AI apps are built or the underlying text or image-generation algorithms trained. One used the name Sora, apparently to suggest a connection to OpenAI’s video generator of that name, which has not been publicly released.

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  • The Incognito Mode Myth Has Fully Unraveled

    The Incognito Mode Myth Has Fully Unraveled

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    If you still hold any notion that Google Chrome’s “Incognito mode” is a good way to protect your privacy online, now’s a good time to stop.

    Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2020, caps off years of disclosures about Google’s practices that shed light on how much data the tech giant siphons from its users—even when they’re in private-browsing mode.

    Under the terms of the settlement, Google must further update the Incognito mode “splash page” that appears anytime you open an Incognito mode Chrome window after previously updating it in January. The Incognito splash page will explicitly state that Google collects data from third-party websites “regardless of which browsing or browser mode you use,” and stipulate that “third-party sites and apps that integrate our services may still share information with Google,” among other changes. Details about Google’s private-browsing data collection must also appear in the company’s privacy policy.

    Additionally, some of the data that Google previously collected on Incognito users will be deleted. This includes “private-browsing data” that is “older than nine months” from the date that Google signed the term sheet of the settlement last December, as well as private-browsing data collected throughout December 2023. Certain documents in the case referring to Google’s data collection methods remain sealed, however, making it difficult to assess how thorough the deletion process will be.

    Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda says in a statement that the company “is happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.” Castaneda also noted that the company will now pay “zero” dollars as part of the settlement after earlier facing a $5 billion penalty.

    Other steps Google must take will include continuing to “block third-party cookies within Incognito mode for five years,” partially redacting IP addresses to prevent re-identification of anonymized user data, and removing certain header information that can currently be used to identify users with Incognito mode active.

    The data-deletion portion of the settlement agreement follows preemptive changes to Google’s Incognito mode data collection and the ways it describes what Incognito mode does. For nearly four years, Google has been phasing out third-party cookies, which the company says it plans to completely block by the end of 2024. Google also updated Chrome’s Incognito mode “splash page” in January with weaker language to signify that using Incognito is not “private,” but merely “more private” than not using it.

    The settlement’s relief is strictly “injunctive,” meaning its central purpose is to put an end to Google activities that the plaintiffs claim are unlawful. The settlement does not rule out any future claims—The Wall Street Journal reports that the plaintiffs’ attorneys had filed at least 50 such lawsuits in California on Monday—though the plaintiffs note that monetary relief in privacy cases is far more difficult to obtain. The important thing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue, is effecting changes at Google now that will provide the greatest, immediate benefit to the largest number of users.

    Critics of Incognito, a staple of the Chrome browser since 2008, say that, at best, the protections it offers fall flat in the face of the sophisticated commercial surveillance bearing down on most users today; at worst, they say, the feature fills people with a false sense of security, helping companies like Google passively monitor millions of users who’ve been duped into thinking they’re browsing alone.

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  • Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies

    Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies

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    Everywhere you go online, you’re being tracked. Almost every time you visit a website, trackers gather data about your browsing and funnel it back into targeted advertising systems, which build up detailed profiles about your interests and make big profits in the process. In some places, you’re tracked more than others.

    In a little-noticed change at the end of last year, thousands of websites started being more transparent about how many companies your data is being shared with. In November, those infuriating cookie pop-ups—which ask your permission to collect and share data—began sharing how many advertising “partners” each website is working with, giving a further glimpse of the sprawling advertising ecosystem. For many sites, it’s not pretty.

    A WIRED analysis of the top 10,000 most popular websites shows dozens of sites say they are sharing data with more than 1,000 companies, while thousands of other websites are sharing data with hundreds of firms. Quiz and puzzle website JetPunk tops the pile, listing 1,809 “partners” that may collect personal information, including “browsing behavior or unique IDs.”

    More than 20 websites from publisher Dotdash Meredith—including investopedia.com, people.com, and allrecipes.com—all say they can share data with 1,609 partners. The newspaper The Daily Mail lists 1,207 partners, while internet speed monitoring firm Speedtest.net, online medical publisher WebMD, and media outlets Reuters, ESPN, and BuzzFeed all state they can share data with 809 companies. (WIRED, for context, lists 164 partners). These hundreds of advertising partners include dozens of firms most people have likely never heard of.

    “You can always assume all of them are first going to try and disambiguate who you are,” says Midas Nouwens, an associate professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has previously built tools to automatically opt-out of tracking by cookie pop-ups and helped with the website analysis. The data collected can vary by website, and the cookie pop-ups allow some control over what can be gathered; however, the information can include IP addresses, fingerprinting of devices, and various identifiers. “Once they know that, they might add you to different data sets, or use it for enrichment later when you go to a different site,” Nouwens says.

    The online advertising world is a messy, murky space, which can involve networks of companies building profiles of people with the aim of showing you tailored ads the second you open a webpage. For years, strong privacy laws in Europe, such as GDPR, have resulted in websites showing cookie consent pop-ups that ask for permission to store cookies that collect data on your device. In recent years, studies have shown cookie pop-ups have included dark patterns, disregarded people’s choices, and are ignored by people. “Every single person we’ve ever observed in user testing doesn’t read any of this. They find the fastest way they can to close it out,” says Peter Dolanjski, a product director at privacy focused search engine and browser DuckDuckGo. “So they end up in a worse privacy state.”

    For the website analysis, Nouwens scraped the 10,000 most popular websites and analyzed whether the collected pop-ups mentioned partners and, if so, the number they disclosed. WIRED manually verified all the websites mentioned in this story, visiting each to confirm the number of partners they displayed. We looked at the highest total number of partners within the whole dataset, and the highest number of partners for the top 1,000 most popular websites. The process, which is only a snapshot of how websites share data, provides one view of the complex ecosystem. The results can vary depending on where in the world someone visits a website from.

    It also only includes websites using just one system to display cookie pop-ups. Many of the world’s biggest websites—think Google, Facebook, and TikTok—use their own cookie pop-ups. However, thousands of websites, including publishers and retailers, use third-party technology, made by consent management platforms (CMPs), to show the pop-ups. These pop-ups largely follow standards from the marketing and advertising group IAB Europe, which details the information that should be included in the cookie pop-ups.

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  • Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

    Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

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    The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, though it clocked in at a similar 25 minutes to 30 minutes per day.

    Other data suggests that the stock of content on Reddit for users to peruse has been roughly constant recently, despite users’ continued activity. Reddit gained 1 billion posts and comments per quarter in 2022, closing the year with 17 billion pieces of content on the platform in total. But that figure fell to 16 billion last September, potentially reflecting improved measurement or the removal of problematic content, before ending up back at 17 billion last December.

    Overseas Struggles

    When US internet companies go public they often claim that luring users from overseas will provide powerful growth. Google and Meta now serve billions of people around the world.

    Reddit’s overseas prospects look less rosy. Even as it pushes into new countries, such as France and Germany, the dominance of English-language content on the platform appears to be growing. Reddit reported that over two-thirds of all posts in late 2021 through 2022 were in English. By the second half of 2023, that grew to over 90 percent of all posts.

    That happened despite Reddit investing in contractors and translators to encourage more content in French, German, and additional languages other than English. One translation project led some Reddit users to think their communities were being run over by spambot rings. Current and former employees say it’s possible that Reddit’s ability to measure non-English content evolved, and that English content hasn’t become more dominant.

    Dependence on Google

    Like for many online businesses, Reddit’s traffic relies in part on referrals from search engines—primarily the dominant player, Google. In early draft filings, Reddit shared figures showing its reliance on search engine traffic falling through 2022, dropping to a low of about one in five users coming via search results.

    That was generally seen as a good sign because it suggested Reddit had a loyal user base and was becoming less dependent on Google. Responding to its search algorithm updates that slashed traffic to Reddit had previously triggered moments of “all hands on deck” crisis at the platform, a former employee says.

    Reddit stopped disclosing figures on search traffic in more recent updates, but there are signs it’s becoming more dependent on Google again. The platform’s IPO filing from last month says that in the second half of 2023, about 75 percent of new users added were not logged in, who “typically come to Reddit via search engines.” Reddit says logged-out users spend less time on the service and are less lucrative. Former employees say that’s because logged-out users tend to visit individual posts and then leave, which usually have fewer ads than news feeds that logged-in users curate and scroll.

    Bringing More Brands Onto Reddit

    After teasing it in an IPO filing last month, the company this month launched Reddit Pro, a free service that provides a dashboard to help businesses understand what’s trending, the audience their posts are reaching, and, of course, pay to boost the reach of their posts.

    Brands such as Taco Bell and the National Football League have been testing Reddit Pro. It’s possible the new service could be a precursor to allowing businesses and organizations to open up communities in their name using the convention b/ or o/ to stand out, some former employees say, as alternatives to Reddit’s longstanding use of r/ to denote different communities.

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  • How a Small Iowa Newspaper’s Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory

    How a Small Iowa Newspaper’s Website Became an AI-Generated Clickbait Factory

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    In his spare time, Tony Eastin likes to dabble in the stock market. One day last year, he Googled a pharmaceutical company that seemed like a promising investment. One of the first search results Google served up on its news tab was listed as coming from the Clayton County Register, a newspaper in northeastern Iowa. He clicked, and read. The story was garbled and devoid of useful information—and so were all the other finance-themed posts filling the site, which had absolutely nothing to do with northeastern Iowa. “I knew right away there was something off,” he says. There’s plenty of junk on the internet, but this struck Eastin as strange: Why would a small midwestern paper churn out crappy blog posts about retail investing?

    Eastin was primed to find online mysteries irresistible. After years in the US Air Force working on psychological warfare campaigns he had joined Meta where he investigated nastiness ranging from child abuse to political influence operations. Now he was between jobs, and welcomed a new mission. So Eastin reached out to Sandeep Abraham, a friend and former Meta colleague who previously worked in Army intelligence and for the NSA, and suggested they start digging.

    What the pair uncovered provides a snapshot of how generative AI is enabling deceptive new online business models. Networks of websites crammed with AI-generated clickbait are being built by preying on the reputations of established media outlets and brands. These outlets prosper by confusing and misleading audiences and advertisers alike, “domain squatting” on URLs that once belonged to more reputable organizations. The scuzzy site Eastin was referred to no longer belonged to the newspaper whose name it still traded in the name of.

    Although Eastin and Abraham suspect that the network the Register’s old site is now part of was created with straightforward money-making goals, they fear that more malicious actors could use the same sort of tactics to push misinformation and propaganda into search results. “This is massively threatening,” Abraham says. “We want to raise some alarm bells.” To that end, the pair have released a report on their findings and plan to release more as they dig deeper into the world of AI clickbait, hoping their spare-time efforts can help draw awareness to the issue from the public or lawmakers.

    Faked News

    The Clayton County Register was founded in 1926 and covered the small town of Ekader, Iowa, and wider Clayton County, which nestle against the Mississippi River in the state’s northeast corner. “It was a popular paper,” says former coeditor Bryce Durbin, who describes himself as “disgusted” by what’s now published at its former web address, claytoncountyregister.com. (The real Clayton County Register merged in 2020 with The North Iowa Times to become the Times-Register which publishes at a different website. It’s not clear how the paper lost control of its web domain; the Times-Register did not return requests for comment.)

    As Eastin discovered when trying to research his pharma stock, the site still brands itself as the Clayton County Register but no longer offers local news and is instead a financial news content mill. It publishes what appear to be AI-generated articles about the stock prices of public utility companies and Web3 startups, illustrated by images that are also apparently AI-generated.

    “Not only are the articles we looked at generated by AI, but the images included in each article were all created using diffusion models,” says Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection startup Reality Defender, which ran an analysis on several articles at WIRED’s request. In addition to that confirmation, Abraham and Eastin noticed that some of the articles included text admitting their artificial origins. “It’s important to note that this information was auto-generated by Automated Insights,” some of the articles stated, name-dropping a company that offers language-generation technology.

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  • The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything

    The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything

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    The impact on the public sphere has been, to say the least, substantial. In removing so much liability, Section 230 forced a certain sort of business plan into prominence, one based not on uniquely available information from a given service, but on the paid arbitration of access and influence. Thus, we ended up with the deceptively named “advertising” business model—and a whole society thrust into a 24/7 competition for attention. A polarized social media ecosystem. Recommender algorithms that mediate content and optimize for engagement. We have learned that humans are most engaged, at least from an algorithm’s point of view, by rapid-fire emotions related to fight-or-flight responses and other high-stakes interactions. In enabling the privatization of the public square, Section 230 has inadvertently rendered impossible deliberation between citizens who are supposed to be equal before the law. Perverse incentives promote cranky speech, which effectively suppresses thoughtful speech.

    And then there is the economic imbalance. Internet platforms that rely on Section 230 tend to harvest personal data for their business goals without appropriate compensation. Even when data ought to be protected or prohibited by copyright or some other method, Section 230 often effectively places the onus on the violated party through the requirement of takedown notices. That switch in the order of events related to liability is comparable to the difference between opt-in and opt-out in privacy. It might seem like a technicality, but it is actually a massive difference that produces substantial harms. For example, workers in information-related industries such as local news have seen stark declines in economic success and prestige. Section 230 makes a world of data dignity functionally impossible.

    To date, content moderation has too often been beholden to the quest for attention and engagement, regularly disregarding the stated corporate terms of service. Rules are often bent to maximize engagement through inflammation, which can mean doing harm to personal and societal well-being. The excuse is that this is not censorship, but is it really not? Arbitrary rules, doxing practices, and cancel culture have led to something hard to distinguish from censorship for the sober and well-meaning. At the same time, the amplification of incendiary free speech for bad actors encourages mob rule. All of this takes place under Section 230’s liability shield, which effectively gives tech companies carte blanche for a short-sighted version of self-serving behavior. Disdain for these companies—which found a way to be more than carriers, and yet not publishers—is the only thing everyone in America seems to agree on now.

    Trading a known for an unknown is always terrifying, especially for those with the most to lose. Since at least some of Section 230’s network effects were anticipated at its inception, it should have had a sunset clause. It did not. Rather than focusing exclusively on the disruption that axing 26 words would spawn, it is useful to consider potential positive effects. When we imagine a post-230 world, we discover something surprising: a world of hope and renewal worth inhabiting.

    In one sense, it’s already happening. Certain companies are taking steps on their own, right now, toward a post-230 future. YouTube, for instance, is diligently building alternative income streams to advertising, and top creators are getting more options for earning. Together, these voluntary moves suggest a different, more publisher-like self-concept. YouTube is ready for the post-230 era, it would seem. (On the other hand, a company like X, which leans hard into 230, has been destroying its value with astonishing velocity.) Plus, there have always been exceptions to Section 230. For instance, if someone enters private information, there are laws to protect it in some cases. That means dating websites, say, have the option of charging fees instead of relying on a 230-style business model. The existence of these exceptions suggests that more examples would appear in a post-230 world.

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  • Martin Scorsese’s Squarespace Super Bowl Ad Wants You to Put Down Your Phone

    Martin Scorsese’s Squarespace Super Bowl Ad Wants You to Put Down Your Phone

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    Even on Zoom, Martin Scorsese knows how to frame the shot. Ostensibly he’s dialed in to talk about his new Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, but as he’s settling in, he adjusts the iPad he’s calling from to make sure his face is framed perfectly by the bookshelves behind him.

    It’s not so much vanity as a desire to take digital communication seriously. Scorsese’s Super Bowl spot is a punchy, humorous riff about what would happen if extraterrestrials came to Earth and couldn’t get humanity’s attention because everyone is lost in their phones. It’s funny, but also something Scorsese thinks about. At 81, he says, he remembers the transition from radio to television to film and puts a lot of thought into how people from every generation consume visual media.

    Including, now, on TikTok. Late last year, the legendary filmmaker—who recently received his 10th Best Director Oscar nomination, for Killers of the Flower Moon—went viral when his daughter Francesca Scorsese started posted a video of her dad on the video-sharing app learning slang. He says he may never be good at storytelling on TikTok, but a 30-second spot? That he can do.

    WIRED talked to Scorsese about his Squarespace ad, the rise of artificial intelligence in filmmaking, and whether or not he’ll be getting a Vision Pro.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Angela Watercutter: Shall we dive right in?

    Martin Scorsese: I guess so. I’ll do my best. [Laughs]

    I saw the behind-the-scenes you did with Francesca the other day. How is it working with your daughter as a collaborator?

    Well, it’s just an extension of the two of us and how we normally behave. So for me it’s very grounding. There’s no judgment, or there’s no direction in any sense. It’s really playing off each other. It seems to flow very naturally with her.

    You’re both very funny.

    I think she has a wonderful sense of humor, and she’s a very good actor. Some, it’s not acting, you know, it’s just simply being. Simply is not easy. But that’s the key.

    Does this mean we’re gonna get some more TikToks soon? I know the internet has been anticipating them.

    We would like to post a few more. Right now it’s a little busy. If she comes up with an interesting idea during the nature of the work itself, where we’re doing interviews and we’re going places to do an event or whatever, that adds an energy to it. It makes it even more natural. In a way, it’s disarming, because we have no choice. We have to get this done and it’s like, “Let’s go do it,” rather than “Don’t bother me. Get away from me with that iPhone.” I like the iPhone, I’m just saying keep it away from me.

    Ha! Right. I know what you mean.

    I don’t know what winds up on the internet. I was not aware that it would be posted. However, it’s all right.



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