Google Will Also Hurt Meta in the Future, Who Should Be Doxxed?, and Social Media Stops Large Bad Actors

🪖 Creator: TikTok Will Tell Us When WWIII Will Start

🐵 Crypto: Backlash of BAYC Doxxing

📱 Product: Android Follows the Privacy Path

Russian Stockpile Is On TikTok#

You know how you check Twitter to see if anyone else felt that earthquake? Well, on TikTok, you can see if World War III is starting. Videos of military equipment stockpiling and troop movement made rounds on TikTok for over a year and has increased recently. It’s becoming more difficult for governments to conduct large covert operations — which I think is a good thing, since it tends to be a requirement for war and genocide. If a country has free and open access to the internet, it’s harder for large scale bad actors to operate. Though there is a flip side, it also allows for the amplification of emotional, inflammatory, and wrong information. Can’t have everything, I guess.

(This was a creator-ish snippet)

Who Is Allowed Anonymity and Pseudonymity?#

Vice released a piece this week about reactions to BuzzFeed’s doxxing of the Bored Ape creators. The original piece highlighted that the two creators were building a multi-billion dollar business, and asked if it was okay to be operated pseudonymously. The web3 community was not happy about the doxxing. There’s a wide gamut of responses, but reverse doxxing of Katie (original author) is bad.

This whole debacle raises an interesting question of who is allowed anonymity or pseudonymity. As a society, we certainly seem to believe that individuals deserve privacy. Websites don’t force us to share our identities — you can amass huge followings and an audience as a pseudonymous creator and wield “soft power”. On the other hand, we expect heads of state and leaders to be real people with skin in the game. So where do we draw the line? Is it when money is involved? And who gets to decide?

Google Fires Up the Privacy Engine#

Similar to Apple’s sweeping privacy changes, Google is planning to update how it deals with ad tracking on Android phones. The biggest difference to Apple’s approach is the speed and amount of lead time other organizations have before the change. Google is proposing a “multi-year initiative” to flesh out “Privacy Sandbox”. This makes sense — users expect this change, Google is facing antitrust issues, and nobody wants another third party issue like Cambridge Analytica.

What I find interesting is that the actual implementation and how the ad-serving mechanism will work, is still up in the air. But I expect, now that third parties can’t really track or segment users, Google wins by providing its own segmentations and being the sole owner of it. Overall, this feels like the right move for the industry, it seems other ad providers (Meta/Facebook, Snap) are losers in this situation, and Google’s ad business will only get stronger — but we’ll see what level of segmentation they plan on surfacing.