The US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “Liking” something on Facebook is considered a form of speech, and is protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The case which prompted this ruling was originally filed in 2011 as a wrongful termination case. Sheriff’s deputies were fired after they went on Facebook … Read more
The FTC has recently announced that they will be examining the use of ‘sponsored content’ advertising in digital media. The organization will be holding a workshop this December to discuss and examine these advertisements which are designed to look just like real stories posted on news sites and social media pages. Sponsored content has become … Read more
The Federal Trade Commission is looking into the latest set of privacy policy updates that Facebook proposed in late August. The agency claims that it is a routine monitoring, and that no official investigation has been launched, though what the difference between ‘monitoring’ and an ‘official investigation’ is not mentioned. These changes have not yet … Read more
A report was recently released by Solve Media which estimates that the global digital advertising industry is going to be spending about $9.5 Billion in advertising to bots and other non-human entities. The mobile advertising is also being seen by a growing number of bots. The report finds that between 43 and 46% of web … Read more
Yahoo! has become the latest in a growing list of Internet companies which are issuing transparency reports to show the number and type of governmental requests for information are coming from. The report has found, as expected, that 42% of all the requests are coming from the government of the United States. The total number … Read more
An agreement requiring Facebook Inc. to pay $20 million and amend its terms of service to give users more control over use of their names and likenesses as part of its “Sponsored Stories” advertising program was approval on Monday by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The Sponsored Stories feature combined … Read more
Jesta Digital, a mobile company which according to their website delivers content, music, games and apps to its customers recently settled a lawsuit brought on by the FTC for $1.2 million as well as issuing refunds to a large number of customers. What did Jesta do which warranted the lawsuit? According to the FTC complaint … Read more
A recently launched campaign by the Open Rights Group requesting that a new HTTP 400 range status code be created is starting to gain some significant traction. The 400 range codes are commonly used to give users information about why a particular page can’t be displayed, and include problems like 400: Bad Request, 403 Forbidden … Read more
Google was forced to pay $22.5 Million to settle a case against the US FTC concerning the cookie-privacy settings, which were circumvented in the Safari browser. This was a complicated and well documented case which cost Google a significant amount of time and money, as well as required them to change how they used cookies … Read more
Pay-Per-View ad networks have long been known to provide marketers with huge amounts of traffic without costing much. Of course, the down side is that the quality of traffic is extremely low. The visitors are being paid for each page they view, so they aren’t going to be motivated to spend any real time on … Read more
Bitcoin, the digital currency which has gained a lot of attention and success over the past several years, has been running into some issues recently. The first, and most significant, of these problems is concerning the security of the currency. Hackers have been attempting to find ways to steal the currency, and with some success. … Read more
In late June an article was published HERE on Performance Marketing Insider concerning a letter from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to 24 search based internet companies. The letter was specifically about the formatting and location of paid advertisements on search results pages. At the time the FTC only said, “AOL, ASK, Bing, Blekko, Duck … Read more
Several years ago Apple began preventing third party book sellers on Apple devices to link from their apps to their online stores. Apple did this in order to prevent publishers from using the massive reach of the iOS powered devices in order to make sales through competitor markets such as Amazon.com. While customers could still … Read more
In response to thousands of complaints from consumers, the FTC moved today to shut down several major companies engaged in “free gift card scams.” The companies involved are Acquinity Interactive, Revenue Parth, World Wide Commerce, FireBrand Group and their respective owners and officers. The complaint claims that consumers received “unwanted text messages” that claiming that … Read more