FACEBOOK'S BRAZEN DUPLICITY

Just another good faith gesture from your friends at Facebook. According to The Guardian, "...for tax purposes, Facebook will continue to book their revenue through Facebook’s Irish office, but for privacy protections, they (consumers) will deal with the company’s headquarters in California." Yeah, good luck with that.

Meanwhile, Facebook was also busy "protecting our privacy" (c'mon, you heard the Z-man -- it's their number one priority!) by re-writing their data policy. In a blog post last month I calculated that FB's terms of service and privacy policies are longer than the US Constitution. Well, to maintain a perfect track record, this week they increased the language of their data policy by 55%, you know, just to make things more convenient for us.

The Wall Street Journal summarized Facebook's data policy this week and I'm going to recap a few of the lovely things FB does so we can all see how wonderfully they are guarding our privacy:

   - FB maintains the right to collect your phone number and other information about you when anyone, including people you don't know, upload their contacts that may include you.

   - Even when you turn off location services, FB tracks your location through Wi-Fi access points, cell towers and IP addresses.

   - You probably think FB is collecting data about you from the device you're using. Silly you. If you are anywhere near any other devices on your network they are collecting info from those devices as well. It's magic!

   - FB tracks you through third parties whether or not you are logged into Facebook.

   - And the pièce de résistance -- Facebook's new data policy asserts that they track you even if you don't have a Facebook account.

I'm going to say it once more (but not for the last time) --  these creeps have got to be stopped.

Last week CNN uncovered ads from over 300 major brands (including Amazon, Adidas, Netflix, Nordstrom and UnderArmour) connected to nazi, pedophilia, and North Korean propaganda videos. They also found ads on these videos from -- you can't make this shit up -- five US government agencies.

But don't worry. Google will promise to clean it up.

Let's be clear about something. Brand safety and personal privacy will never be a reality until the current unsavory practices of adtech, tracking, and surveillance marketing are scrapped by the advertising and media industries. 

Ford has been messing with WPP for months. Ford's management has been in complete disarray -- with top-level people coming and going faster than Presidential appointees.

There is no greater danger to an agency than when a client's management is changing. No matter how dumb the new management regime is, they always believe the old management was even dumber (as I've said many times, in American business there's nothing stupider than the previous generation of management.) So WPP is saddled with the smell of the old guard.

Ford spends over two billion dollars annually on advertising, and over 4 billion on marketing related services. WPP's search for a new ceo just got way, way harder.

First stop is Toronto in three weeks to keynote at the International Radio Summit during Canadian Music Week (they gently asked me to leave my guitar at home.) A few weeks later I'll be going to Oslo to speak at the Norwegian Association of Advertisers' Adtech Programmatic conference. Talks are also in the planning stages for Brussels, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, and maybe even New Jersey.

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