24 December 2013
Can you afford not to have a new Generic Top Level Domain?
Anyone who has ever tried to buy a house will know that location is everything. In London, house buyers will pay a premium for an average house in a sought-after postcode purely so they can utter those magic 3 words “NW3” or “SW3 at the end of their address. The internet is no different and with the recent launch of the gTLD program (Generic Top Level Domains), a whole raft of domain name suffixes has now become available, indeed Rich Merdinger cannily describes these domain names as “21st century real estate”.
28 October 2013
Misleading advertising: the games people play
If you have young children of your own or nieces or nephews you have probably endured hours of Dora the Explorer, Peppa Pig, In the Night Garden (I could go on) and will have therefore also borne witness to the barrage of advertising for various children’s toys and games and the “hard-sell” techniques targeted at young viewers...
25 July 2013
Do Not Track – positive for privacy or the end of the internet as we know it?
As I mentioned in my blog ‘Targeted advertising and privacy’ last week, Do Not Track (DNT) is a system which sends out a line of code to third party websites indicating that they should disable their tracking of a user’s web browser activities. DNT prevents the gathering of data which enables tailored behavioural advertising. This system is currently voluntary meaning that a user generally has to opt in to DNT and then rely on a website to understand and respect the DNT signal its browser sends out.
17 July 2013
Targeted advertising and privacy
‘Tailored advertising’ or ‘retargeting’ allows businesses to target advertising at people who visited their site but didn’t buy anything. These type of ads are becoming more and more common, as Tory MP Gavin Barwell discovered the hard way when he sarcastically tweeted “I know Labour are short of cash but having an invitation to “date Arab girls” at top of your press release?”. Facebook and Google already offer tailored advertising and Twitter announced this month that it will soon be trialling ‘promoted tweets’. These are ads displaying content from brands and businesses in which a user has already shown interest.
5 July 2013
Data protection in mobile apps: boring, but ignore it at your peril
The range of apps for mobile devices is astounding. I doubt that there is anyone reading this that does not have at least a few apps on their smartphone whether Runkeeper, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or even the latest find love app (swipe to left if it’s a no or to the right if it’s a yes).