Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War - For centuries, the country has lived in the shadow of empire. But its past also provides the key to its present. - link

• Can Liberty University Be Saved? - After Jerry Falwell, Jr.,’s ouster, some students and alumni have sought a more thorough excavation of Liberty’s values. - link

• The Worst Boyfriend on the Upper East Side - For decades, a man has romanced New York women, persuading them to invest in questionable business deals. How did he keep running the same scam? - link

• The Exile of Guatemala’s Anti-Corruption Efforts - A group of prosecutors and judges who investigated the country’s most powerful officials have been forced to flee to Washington, D.C. - link

• Don’t Take the Surprising Drop in G.D.P. at Face Value - Some special factors reduced headline growth in the first quarter. - link

From Vox

• The Offer is a TV show about how great movies are -

  

  The Paramount+ show is less about the making of The Godfather than the miracle that movies ever get made.

  Midway through the pilot episode of The Offer, future Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) is sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend, gaping at the audience around him, who are gasping at the famously shocking concluding moments of Planet of the Apes. It’s 1968, and Ruddy is fresh off Hogan’s Heroes, the TV show he co-created. But TV bores him. He wants more. He wants the big screen.

  “It’s not just about the ending, it’s about the experience of it,” he tells his girlfriend. Waxing enthusiastic about the collective emotion of movie theaters, he concludes that you “can’t get that experience in television. You’re just sitting in your living room, looking at a fucking box.”

  Now, of course, to actually watch this scene, you have to look at that same effing box, or maybe your laptop or your phone, all visible at that moment through a thick scrim of irony. But The Offer, a show that’s less about how one of the greatest big-screen films in history was made than how it almost wasn’t made, seems comfortable with the contradiction. Throughout its 10-episode runtime — available, with even more irony, only on the Paramount+ streaming service — various characters trot onscreen to extol daring cinema and denigrate television and brainless movies. Legendary Paramount head of production Robert Evans (played in an absolutely virtuosic turn by Matthew Goode) gives a couple of lengthy speeches about the magic of cinema. Ruddy tells a group of FBI agents that “TV’s too limiting. You can’t do real stories on TV.”

  Paramount

Which means it’s almost as interesting as an artifact of our time, when movies and TV are in flux, as it is as a story about 1970s Hollywood. I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t fascinated by Hollywood minutiae really watching The Offer, which isn’t to say they shouldn’t try. It’s uneven, but a handful of solid performances anchor it — Juno Temple (as Ruddy’s plucky assistant Bettye McCartt), and Dan Fogler (who makes a surprisingly good Francis Ford Coppola), and the go-for-broke Goode — with a fine showing by Teller, as Ruddy is the ostensible center of the show.

In fact, the title credits declare that the show is based on Ruddy’s memories of making The Godfather, which is an uncommon credit to see. Most writing on the movie’s legendary production, from newspaper profiles to books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, has focused on Coppola’s role in driving the project forward. But while Coppola gets plenty of screen time here, it’s Ruddy who’s our main character. The pilot (perhaps the weakest of the episodes) cruises through several years inside of an hour, apparently in an attempt to explain why Ruddy got involved in the Paramount circus to begin with.

The net effect can at times tip over into listening to an old Hollywood hand tell mildly unbelievable war stories for 10 hours, though much of what appears in The Offer sticks, in broad outlines, to the tales others have told. Ruddy got pulled into making The Godfather as a low-budget specialist at Paramount, even though his most recent picture, the 1970 Robert Redford biker flick Little Fauss and Big Halsy, was a bit of a flop. Paramount had acquired rights before publication to Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, but didn’t really want to make it, fearing that it would fail like so many other recent mobster films; once the book became a runaway bestseller, Evans realized they’d better do it.

But the experience for everyone seems to have been somewhere between herding cats and cosplaying Sisyphus. Everything was a debacle. Casting Marlon Brando (considered both a legend and a has-been) and Al Pacino (considered an absolute nobody) seemed impossible. Wrangling locations — not to mention Coppola himself — was a headache. Tangling with executives at Paramount parent company Gulf and Western, irate crew members fed up with their no-name director, and the literal mafia were enough to test the patience of a saint, let alone a movie producer.

Furthermore, The Offer paints production of The Godfather as a trying time that ultimately created a band of brothers — not without interpersonal friction, but in that everybody came to respect one another and be proud of the work they did. The reality is a bit messier. For instance, Evans and Coppola were so profoundly angry at one another by the end of the post-production process that Coppola initially tried to get them to hire Martin Scorsese to direct The Godfather: Part II. Years later, he was still brooding, sending a letter to Evans in the early ’80s about how angry he was that Evans had taken credit for the film’s final form. (Evans framed the letter and hung it in his bathroom.)

Other examples like this abound, if you dig into Godfather history, and even a quick look at Ruddy’s own public work history shows how much personal myth-making is involved. (The show portrays him as just a computer programmer for a defense contractor who kind of stumbled into show business, but he in fact worked for Warner Bros. before he became a programmer; he left when Marlon Brando’s father hired him to produce Wild Seed, not when he landed Hogan’s Heroes, as the show suggests.)

But, artistic license is hard to fault, especially when it’s the nitpicking details of the producer’s career. The overarching sense you get from The Offer is that it is remarkable that any movie is ever successful or good or, indeed, even gets made. If you see a movie that’s good, you’re watching a miracle.

Which might be why The Offer’s greatest service is to remind us that The Godfather is, really, that good. (And so is at least one of its sequels; judge for yourself, as all three are also streaming on Paramount+.) It pushed boundaries artistically, narratively, and technically, and viewers responded, making it the biggest movie in history upon its release. Something about its story, which shifted from Puzo’s juicy potboiler to something far more insightful and allegorical about America, resonates deeply. Get lucky enough to catch it on a big screen, and it feels as exciting as it must have at the film’s premiere.

The show knows, and doesn’t get in the way. It does that, in part, by not trying to be nearly as good as its predecessor, with its daring lighting and cinematography, its uniformly outstanding performances, and its sense of epic scale. When it does pay self-conscious homage to Coppola’s film, it’s in winking references (you’ll get a line about a cannoli in the first couple of minutes). There are several different sequences that cut violence scenes together with more domestic ones, in tribute to the famous assassination-and-baptism scene in the film. But you don’t feel the episodes’ directors stretching beyond the somewhat goofy limits of the show, and that’s probably to its credit.

Yet it does seem oddly self-aware that it’s a TV show bent on promoting cinema (and, in particular, this instance of cinema). All that aforementioned ragging on TV and effusing about the magic of the movies seems purposeful, and reaches levels we usually only hear on stage at the Oscars.

Of course, the 1970s were a different time for both film and TV. Hollywood was riding a strange fault line, existing in a brief and often-valorized pocket of time in which visionaries like Coppola and Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Altman and Warren Beatty and Paul Schrader and a host of others were running the show, making the most exciting movies. There was a lot wrong with that time — only certain sorts of white guys got to talk executives into making their films — but there was something right, too, with exciting and daring movies showing eager audiences what movies could do. “We can’t chase after what the audience wants to see,” Evans says in one triumphant scene late in the show. “We need to show it what it needs to see.”

Meanwhile, TV was still largely working within formulas; storytelling innovations that we now take for granted were far off. That’s not to say it wasn’t great in its own way, or that incredible artists weren’t working in the medium. But the barrier between film and TV talents was much higher and more rigid.

Yet we’re in a totally different media landscape now, and Paramount itself is, like every major entertainment company, trying to figure out what it is going to be. Just two months ago, the movie studio’s parent company, created in 2019 when Viacom merged with CBS, rebranded itself as Paramount Global, after its most prestigious property. Paramount+ itself was first launched in 2014 as CBS All Access and renamed in March 2021. And like every company, they’re trying to figure out the right balance between traditional TV, streaming shows, and big-screen movies that eventually migrate back over to the streaming service. Nobody knows how this will all shake out, but the jitters in Hollywood right now are at a high that rivals the jitters back in Robert Evans’s day.

Which is why diving back into its history to reinforce the brand probably makes sense. As the movie rewrites and refines bits of Godfather history, it spins and smooths out its film’s legend, declaring by the end that the film is widely considered “the best” movie in history. That’s debatable (if you’re speaking of Hollywood, at least, then Citizen Kane would like a word), though there’s no doubt it’s one of them. But as Charlie Bluhdorn (Burn Gorman), president of Gulf and Western and gadfly presence on the set, confides to Evans late in the show, he loves historical movies because they allow you to rewrite history. “Maybe that’s how we can deal with the horror,” he suggests, and while it’s not exactly horror The Offer rewrites, you can kind of see the point. The legend you put on screen is, eventually, more important to the average person than whatever the history books say — both a useful observation and, depending on your perspective, a terrifying one.

And that could be why The Offer’s villains aren’t really the various mobsters and entertainers (cough cough Frank Sinatra) who tried to block The Godfather’s production a half-century ago. They’re the executives who are more interested in chasing what they already know the audience wants than taking a chance on a movie like, well, The Godfather.

The Offer serves up a legend, too. It’s the story of a time in America when movies were king, when the big screen was something to yearn for, when risk might bring reward, when the collective experience was worth breaking your budget and your heart over. That Paramount has chosen to retell that story with a little bit of finessing and artistic license in a time when big-screen movies are hurting badly, when studios are chasing what they think the audience wants to see whether they need to see it or not, feels like a poke in someone’s eye. By the end, I kind of wondered whether it was their own.

The first three episodes of The Offer began streaming on Paramount+ on April 28. The remaining episodes will release on successive Thursdays through June 16.

• The longshot campaign to get big banks out of fossil fuels -

  

  Climate activists lost this week against big banks. Don’t count them out just yet.

  This week, shareholders at Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs voted on resolutions recommending the companies stop any additional financing for fossil fuel projects.

  All the resolutions failed, pretty spectacularly, garnering just over 10 percent of the vote. Despite that failure, the votes were notable examples of a strategy climate activists are implementing with increasing boldness: pressuring institutions from the inside to make meaningful reforms on climate change.

  It’s one that showed some signs of success at the shareholder meetings of energy companies last year, and is also one advocates like Kate Monahan — director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, a fund that sponsored the climate resolution at Bank of America on Tuesday — believe will eventually bear fruit more broadly.

  “I’m optimistic that we can build the vote over time,” she said. “This is a totally new type of proposal. So 11 percent, I think, is a really good base on which to build for next year.”

  The incremental approach this strategy entails can seem frustrating, considering the scientific consensus that the world needs to stop financing new fossil fuel development today. But there is reason to believe it could ultimately have an impact.

The current shareholder push has its roots in the divestment movement, which saw climate activists building a case to a conservative audience of financial institutions, universities, and state pension funds that they should divest their investments from fossil fuel companies. After a decade and a litany of failures, powerful players relented — including Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Harvard University, and New York state’s pension fund.

Now, the global fossil fuel divestment movement has come to represent about $40 trillion in assets. Other firms, like the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, have made public commitments to align their funds with climate targets.

It’s that success that has led the groups behind this week’s resolutions, like the environmental group Sierra Club and asset mangers Harrington Investments and Trillium, to apply daring pressure campaigns at annual shareholder meetings.

The largest institutional shareholders at big banks are still clearly skeptical of this latest ask to stop new fossil fuel finance immediately. In part, that’s because the campaign hasn’t reached the same heights as the divestment movement — just yet.

The long road to changing the conversation around banks’ role in financing a climate crisis

All the banks with meetings this week (and JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, which have shareholder votes next month), joined a coalition at last fall’s climate conference in Glasgow aligning their financing with reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Despite that pledge, the same banks all still fund fossil fuel development that ensures they are not aligned with these longer-term targets.

“Now we need to see the policies that will actually make that happen,” Sierra Club’s investor committee chair, Loren Blackford, said.

To that end, Sierra Club’s proposal (similar to the others from this week) requested Goldman Sachs commit to “proactive measures to ensure that the firm’s lending and underwritten activities do not contribute to new fossil fuel development.”

It argued there were two problems: that Goldman Sachs’s “prominence in asserting climate leadership flies in the face of its actions, creating reputation risk from accusations of greenwashing” and that the bank is putting its long-term stability and gains at risk by pouring money into a dying industry — “knowingly loading potentially stranded assets onto its clients’ balance sheets, creating litigation risk.”

Big banks are indeed continuing to fund fossil fuel expansion: Last year alone, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America spent a combined $137 billion on fossil fuel projects, according to a report from a coalition of environmental advocacy groups, Banking on Climate Chaos. (JPMorgan Chase by itself spent over $61 billion in 2021 on fossil fuels.)

There are a few reasons for this.

One is that banks are deeply intertwined with fossil fuel companies even though their rhetoric suggests the opposite. The Banking on Climate Chaos report found that the 60 biggest banks spent about $4.6 trillion on fossil fuel investments since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and about $742 billion last year alone. The pandemic illustrated just how exposed banks are to volatility in the oil market. When global demand for oil plummeted in 2020, big banks like JPMorgan advocated on behalf of oil companies for federal stimulus.

Climate advocates argue the only way to avoid similar fallout again is by limiting further investment in the sector. Bank boards disagree, so much so that they went to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to block this week’s votes. When the SEC didn’t intervene, the boards campaigned against the proposals. Goldman’s board finally said that it’s committed to the climate goals set out six years ago in Paris; however, they said, “We do not believe that placing limits on financing to producers will result in either reduction in emissions or demand for fossil fuels.”

Another factor is current turmoil in the oil market, caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine. That made any climate proposal a harder sell to major asset managers who are worried about their bottom line.

The importance of swaying the wealthiest companies owning stock at any given meeting — particularly firms like BlackRock and Vanguard — can’t be understated either. These two asset managers backed the climate proposals at energy companies last year, ensuring their victory. And although BlackRock and Vanguard have not yet disclosed their votes from this week, it’s expected, given the final results, they didn’t support the 2022 initiatives. Getting BlackRock on board, along with pension funds and other major asset managers, will be crucial to raise the stakes for financial institutions.

Changing banks’ approach to fossil fuels is difficult, not necessarily impossible

There are a few reasons for hope though.

One is that the play to get a giant corporation’s attention at the general shareholder meetings is not particularly new, and success doesn’t always entirely depend on getting to a majority. In 2019, for instance, environmental campaigners attempted to get Goldman Sachs to stop financing Arctic oil exploration. The company responded by making an initial pledge commitment not to fund drilling in the Arctic.

Another is climate activists’ successes in last year’s oil company meetings. Shareholders at Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 voted for more disclosure on climate preparation. And ExxonMobil lost three board seats to climate activist-backed candidates. In these cases, shareholders actually overrode the board’s recommendations against taking climate action.

Finally, there has been growing momentum for more climate disclosure and commitment from companies. Corporate governance analysts at the research group The Conference Board tracked how the average vote for climate-related proposals grew from 24 percent in 2019 up to 32 percent in 2020 (the investor-focused nonprofit Ceres counted another 10-point jump to 41 percent in 2021).

Every year that passes is another year that the world comes up short on its climate commitments. The International Energy Agency and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all asserted that averting the worst of climate change requires the world to stop investing in new fossil fuels, immediately. So rather than play it safe, activists are going bigger and bolder with their resolutions.

Some end in failure. But they’re also banking that someday soon, they might not.

“It may not be a quick process,” Monahan said. “But we believe it’s important for us to try.”

• The winners and losers of Apple’s anti-tracking feature -

  

  Apple’s big privacy update came out a year ago. What did it do for you?

  When Apple rolled out its long-awaited, much-hyped privacy update one year ago this week, it was accompanied by an ad that attempted to visualize what the new feature did. In it, there’s a man going about his day, and every time he interacts with a business, an employee latches on and starts following him everywhere he goes, collecting and broadcasting the man’s personal information. A prompt shows up on the man’s iPhone, giving him the option to “Ask App Not to Track.” He taps it, and all of his unwelcome guests pop like balloons, disappearing into clouds of dust.

  While evocative, the ad isn’t entirely accurate. The feature, called App Tracking Transparency, doesn’t stop all the ways companies follow you around the internet and in your mobile apps because Apple can’t stop all tracking. Nor does it want to. Your data is still being collected, but what’s being collected and how may have changed. The end result, however, is roughly the same: You’re being targeted with ads.

  That’s not because App Tracking Transparency doesn’t work. Exactly what it does is both limited and difficult for most iPhone users to understand because it’s all happening in lines of code within the opaque world of ad technology. For many people, the only obvious changes are those “Ask App Not to Track” prompts that sometimes pop up when you open an app.

  Apple

But under the surface, a lot has changed. App Tracking Transparency upended the mobile ad industry, which is built on data, by abruptly cutting off one of its streams. Businesses that relied on it spent the last year scrambling to replace that data and rethinking their strategies. Meanwhile, those that didn’t rely on it grew even more powerful than some of them already were.

From a user privacy standpoint, App Tracking Transparency seems like a good thing. It’s just not as good of a thing as you might have thought, or perhaps as Apple wanted you to think it was.

Apple giveth and Apple taketh away

App Tracking Transparency is actually Apple’s attempt to solve a problem it helped create. Tracking people across the internet existed well before the iPhone did, but the iPhone and its third-party apps have led to an exponential increase in the user data being generated. People bring their mobile devices everywhere, do just about everything on them, and are constantly connected to the internet through them. The technology that makes all this possible also makes it easy for apps to collect and monetize the data people generate when they use them.

There’s now a massive, multibillion-dollar mobile advertising economy powered by tracking people through their mobile devices, building comprehensive profiles of them, targeting ads to them based on those profiles, and measuring the effectiveness of those ads. A lot of this tracking happens without the user’s knowledge.

Take Meta, for example. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company has trackers planted in millions of third-party apps and websites. Meta can then link what a device does in one app with what it does in all the other apps Meta’s trackers are in, and even combine that with the device owner’s Facebook or Instagram accounts. Businesses then target ads to that user on the apps and websites Meta’s trackers are buried in.

But people generally don’t like being spied on. Apple also didn’t like that other companies were using its devices to spy on its customers, and it probably didn’t love that third parties were enriching themselves with its users’ data. This situation also wasn’t the best look for the big-on-privacy reputation Apple has worked so hard to build, especially when Meta — a company that Apple has its own issues with — was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the leaky apps on Apple’s devices. App Tracking Transparency could stop one of the methods of tracking that people find to be the most objectionable and creepy, and it could do so without hurting Apple one bit.

The feature works by giving users control of the unique serial number assigned to their devices, known as the identifier for advertisers, or IDFA. The IDFA is how trackers recognize your device when you use different apps and, therefore, how they’re able to link what you do on a bunch of different apps to your specific device. Beginning with the mobile operating system update iOS 14.5 in April 2021, an Apple device will no longer send out the IDFA unless the user opts into being tracked. As far as we know, this is all working as Apple promised.

“A user’s data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom,” an Apple spokesperson told Recode. “With iOS and iPad OS, we have given users the choice whether or not they want to allow apps to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies.”

Getting around App Tracking Transparency the forbidden way

App Tracking Transparency’s limits are twofold. When users have opted out of being tracked — that is, opted not to send out their IDFA — they can still be tracked across apps through other means. There’s also the tracking that happens in ways that Apple allows, probably can’t do much to prevent, and also does for its own ad business.

Even without the IDFA, determined trackers can do what’s known as “fingerprinting.” This involves collecting as much seemingly innocuous device information as possible, including the name and model of the device, user settings, IP address, and carrier. When combined, these details may be unique enough to identify a specific device, effectively serving the same purpose as the IDFA. While the App Store’s policies forbid this practice, there’s nothing technically preventing trackers from doing it anyway. Users are left relying on Apple’s enforcement of its own policies, which some reports suggest has been lax.

“It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” said Konrad Kollnig, a researcher whose recent paper on the impact of Apple’s privacy measures found that some apps were still collecting device information that could be used to fingerprint users. “There’s one part of this tracking going on on the user’s device, but there’s another question around what’s going on inside these data companies. And that’s really difficult for Apple to control.”

There’s also a long history of companies that specialize in collecting user data finding any and all ways to keep collecting user data, no matter what. Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California Berkeley, says it’s more than likely that’s happening now.

“It’s always an arms race,” Egelman said. “Browsers try to add more privacy protections, such as blocking third-party tracking cookies, and the people who have an interest in tracking have come up with new mechanisms for doing so that aren’t reliant on the technologies that are being phased out or blocked.”

The lesson here is not to assume that you aren’t still being tracked across your apps just because Apple said so.

Getting around App Tracking Transparency the Apple-approved way

Another way to understand how Apple’s anti-tracking feature affected user privacy is to look at how it impacted the companies that relied on that tracking. Suffice it to say, they were not thrilled by the idea.

Apple said it doesn’t know how many users declined to be tracked. Estimates vary, but most say that the majority of users — that’s hundreds of millions of devices — opted out. So while trackers are still getting device-level data from the Apple users who opted in, as well as Android users (at least until Google unveils its App Tracking Transparency copycat), they still lost a lot.

“The change was massive. It really turned the mobile marketing space upside down,” Shani Rosenfelder, head of content and mobile insights at AppsFlyer, explained. “[Now] marketers have to break their addiction to user-level data.”

Some companies are shifting to, of all things, the mail. No, not email — mail mail. Email, too, although Apple is coming up with ways to stop email- based tracking. Some businesses Recode spoke to have shifted their ad spending away from Meta, which they say hasn’t given them the kind of results it did before. Zachary Ehrlich, director of paid ads at Doctors Internet, said he’s encouraging clients to use Google search ads. For clients who insist on using Facebook, he puts tracking phone numbers on ads to know if they’re getting returns on those ads, as Meta’s feedback isn’t as accurate as it used to be. Jon Shanahan, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Stryx, a men’s skin care line, said he used to split ad spending between Meta and TikTok. Last August, he moved all of it to TikTok.

“It used to be, you could put money in the [Facebook] machine, you get $5 or $6 back,” Shanahan said. “And now you’re lucky if you get a one-to-one ratio back.”

Meta’s not the only digital ad business to take a hit — Snap is also having problems, for instance — but it’s one of the most prominent, both because of its size and how loudly it complained about Apple’s privacy changes. Meta has said all along that App Tracking Transparency would be bad for its business (actually, it framed it as bad for small businesses that buy ads on Meta, but … you know), and it turned out Meta was right. Meta’s ad business is still growing, and it’s still making plenty of money. But it’s not growing as much as it was before. And for a company like Meta, that’s a big problem.

“Despite Apple’s harmful policy, we’ve continued to adapt our systems to help businesses succeed while honoring privacy, and shared extensive steps they can take to maximize performance and measurement on our platforms,” Meta told Recode.

Luckily for Meta, there are several ways that it — and everyone else — can track users while staying on the right side of Apple’s law. Apple doesn’t let companies track and target you across apps on an individual device level, but it can still track and target people in aggregate. In other words, you can still be targeted as part of a large, anonymous group rather than as a unique user. (Google tried something similar to this with FLoC, its ill-fated attempt to replace web-based trackers.)

There are also “contextual” ads, which aren’t new but are apparently enjoying a renaissance in the relative absence of user-level data. This isn’t just happening because of App Tracking Transparency; privacy laws and the death of website cookies also played a role here. Contextual ads are ones for products that you’re likely to be interested in based on what you’re already looking at. If you’re using a fitness tracker app, for instance, you might get a bunch of ads for exercise gear.

How walled gardens grow

And then there’s the tracking that arguably got the biggest boost from all this. Apple also doesn’t forbid companies from tracking what you do on their own platforms — collecting what’s known as first-party data — and from using that data to target ads to you on those same platforms. Apple does this, too. If they didn’t have their own first-party data sources already, many companies are now building them up or merging with other companies to acquire them. This is why an increasing number of companies strongly urge or even require you to create accounts with them to use their services.

“A retail company can just go advertise directly on Amazon, for example,” Nina Goetzen, a digital advertising and marketing analyst at Insider Intelligence, said. “They have all this data because everyone’s logged in. … And that hasn’t really been affected [by App Tracking Transparency]. These walled gardens are just stronger because of it.”

You may not mind first party-tracking if you think you have an idea of who’s collecting your data, what they’re collecting, and what they’re using it for. And you may be perfectly happy to exchange your data for a free service when you know who you’re making the deal with and what deal you’re making, as opposed to unknowingly sending your data out to a bunch of companies embedded in an app.

But there may be some unintended consequences here. The companies that are benefiting the most from the rise of first-party data and the fall of third-party data are the ones that have the most first-party data, and those companies are going to be some of the biggest in the world — namely, Google and Amazon.

Apple’s ad business, which uses first-party data, is growing — quite a bit, according to some reports. Companies hurt by its privacy measures have cried foul over this, which Apple countered by commissioning a new report that points to several factors for this growth aside from App Tracking Transparency.

There are also concerns that the increased value of first-party data will give the already-powerful walled gardens even more power. Big brands and companies will have the resources to adjust to the changes; small businesses might not. This means they’ll be more reliant on walled gardens than ever, and will fall further behind while the established giants move further ahead, according to Diana Lee, CEO of Constellation, an ad tech company.

“Overall, more monopolies are created this way, whether it be Big Tech or big brands,” Lee said.

Or maybe the existing monopolies are being reinforced. Apple has its own share of antitrust woes, and the App Store is one of the targets of pending federal legislation (Apple denies that it is anti-competitive). Then it flips an entire industry and a lot of businesses’ fortunes upside down with the flick of a switch. Sure, those businesses probably shouldn’t have been so dependent in the first place on sneaky practices consumers didn’t like. But there’s hardly a better example of Apple’s power and control than that. And if you’re an Apple user, that’s a lot of power over you, too.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Formula E, FIA unveil Gen3 cars - Set to be the most efficient formula racing car ever

• 1924 soccer news spurs sports journalism centenary in Assam - Year-long celebration from July 2 will start from Sivasagar, where the football story emanated

• Sindhu enters BAC semifinals, assures India of a medal - Sindhu assured herself of a medal in the continental championships, which is making a return after a gap of two years due to COVID-19 pandemic

• How Wimbledon has got it all wrong on tennis and politics - By banning individual Russian and Belarusian players, it’s dug a trench that is too deep to climb out of

• Australia names full-strength squads for Sri Lanka tour -

From The Hindu: National News

• Pensions amounting to ₹1,548 crore to be disbursed from May 1 to 5 - About 60 lakh beneficiaries to receive the amount at their doorstep

• TRSV stages protest in OU -

• Somu Veerraju meets Union Minister -

• WCC calls for suspension of Vijay Babu from all film bodies - Appalled at deafening silence of industry, it says in Facebook post

• Prolonged dry spell sparks wildfires across Himachal Pradesh - Several acres of forests have been destroyed as temperatures remained above normal for over a month

From BBC: Europe

• A Ukrainian father’s terrifying journey to a Russian prison and back - Nikita Horban was abducted from his village and taken to Russia. He would come back without any toes.

• Ukraine launches hunt for Russian soldiers accused of Bucha war crimes - The 10 Russian soldiers are wanted for alleged war crimes - but at home, they have been hailed as heroes.

• OMV: European energy firm mulls Russia rouble demand - A major importer of Russian gas must decide by May whether to use a controversial payment system.

• Mysterious Zamestim artwork in St Petersburg signals Russia’s anti-West defiance - While some Russians accept the Kremlin’s parallel reality on Ukraine, others take risks to protest.

• Ukraine war: Volunteers deliver emergency contraception pills - Nearly 3,000 packets of morning-after pills have been sent to the country as rape reports rise.

From Ars Technica

• Rocket Report: FAA decision day, or another delay? Using a balloon first stage - “They’re going to scatter my bones or ashes on this property.” - link

• The best games we played at PAX East 2022 - Turtles, bungee grappling hooks, and the French countryside all feature. - link

• Apple has made nearly $100 billion so far this year - Tim Cook credited supply constraints for a year-over-year dip in iPad revenue. - link

• First possible US death reported in international outbreak of child hepatitis - At least 5 states have now reported cases of unexplained severe liver inflammation. - link

• Genetics goes to the dogs, finds there’s not much to breed behavior - One of the strongest genetic associations is to “gets stuck behind objects.” - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• After my retirement at the company I worked at for 50 years, I looked forward to some relaxation time and putting my feet up, but my wife had other ideas… -

  … she insisted I take her to the local shopping centre every day.

  Like most men, I found shopping boring and preferred to get in and out.

  She’s like most women - loves to browse & leaves me with endless time to fulfill.

  Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter, from the local Shopping centre:

  Dear Mrs. Harris:

  Over the past six months, your husband has caused quite a commotion, in our store.

  We cannot tolerate this behavior and have been forced to, ban both of you from the store.

  Our complaints against your husband, Mr. Harris, are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance cameras:

  June 15: He took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in other people’s carts when they weren’t looking.

  July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.

  July 7: He made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the women’s restroom.

  July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official voice, ‘Code 3 in House wares. Get on it right away’. This caused the employee to leave her assigned station and receive a reprimand from her Supervisor that in turn resulted with a union grievance, causing management to lose time; and costing the company money. We don’t have a Code 3.

  August 4: Went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&Ms on layaway.

  August 14: Moved a, ‘CAUTION - WET FLOOR’ sign to a carpeted area.

  August 15: Set up a tent in the camping department and told the children shoppers he’d invite them in if they would bring pillows and blankets from the bedding department to which twenty children obliged.

  August 23: When a clerk asked if they could help him he began crying and screamed, ‘Why can’t you people just leave me alone?’ EMTs were called.

  September 4: Looked right into the security camera and used it as a mirror while he picked his nose.

  September 10: While handling guns in the hunting department, he asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.

  October 3: Darted around the store suspiciously while, loudly humming the, ‘Mission Impossible’ theme.

  October 6: In the auto department, he practiced his, ‘Madonna Look’ using different sizes of funnels.

  October 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed through, yelled ‘PICK ME! PICK ME!’

  October 22: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he assumed a fetal position and screamed;

  ‘OH NO! IT’S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!’

  Took a box of condoms to the checkout clerk and asked where is the fitting room?

  And last, but not least:

  October 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited awhile; then yelled very loudly, ‘Hey! There’s no toilet paper in here.’ One of the clerks passed out.

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
  [link] [comments]

• North Koreans believe they live in the best country in the world because they’re brainwashed by their government and the media. -

  But I know that can’t possibly be true. Because every American knows that America is the best country in the world.

  submitted by /u/MEforgotUSERNAME
  [link] [comments]

• I got jumped by five black guys in Baltimore… -

  They were real nice. Car started right up, and they even helped me with directions back to the interstate.

  submitted by /u/Ralph–Hinkley
  [link] [comments]

• My Ex called me a sex machine -

  Well. her exact words were “fucking tool” but I knew what she meant.

  Taken from Tinder bio post…

  submitted by /u/dirtybird971
  [link] [comments]

• Three sailors are discussing their cargo -

  They are used to transporting goods and make a good living doing so, this time however they’ve been tasked with taking 300 boxes of penis shaped potatoes across the channel and they all think it’s a joke.

  “We’ll be a laughing stock” says the first sailor.

  “I’ll never be able to live it down” says the second.

  “Let’s tell the captain that we’ve decided not to go” says the third.

  Headstrong they head to the captains quarters to voice their displeasure and inform him of their decision.

  The captain hears them out but ultimately disagrees and informs them that they’ll be going ahead with the journey.

  “But we’ve got you outvoted 3 to 1” the sailors cried in unison.

  “You fools” said the captain “you’re all forgetting one thing!”

  “What’s that?” Exclaimed the sailors.

  The captain stood tall and addressed them powerfully.

  “That this isn’t a democracy…”

  “It’s a dick tater ship!”

  submitted by /u/YZXFILE
  [link] [comments]