TWW 059

Friday 1st April

March 31, 2022

Things you may have missed🏖

Things You Should Know 👀

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  • Millions of US & EU smartphone users are unknowingly sending user, device & IP address info to servers in Russia

  • But how, you nerd?! Well, Yandex (Russia’s version of Google) has embedded coding software into thousands of apps that share data directly back to servers in Russia.

  • The software coding is an SDK (software development kit) - basically, how you build an app. This isn’t new either, lots of apps use the Google SDK

  • Now, the numbers. 52,000 apps have used the Yandex SDK Appmetrica - 45,000 Android & 7,000 iOS

  • The Appmetrica SDK shares user metadata back to Russian servers, with the data able to be used to ID people & track movements.

Pretty scary ay? A lot of privacy & political journalists have said for a long time that the next war will be waged on the interwebs. One thing to remember with this article too, is that the Google & Facebook SDK are embedded in THOUSANDS of apps - so this exploitation is possible here too.

Cool Stuff😎

Sacré Bleu! Monsieur Macron wants to rendezvous avec vous sur Minecraft. The French president takes campaigning virtual, to engage new audiences in his bid for reelection. The big question is when the ScoMo Hawaiian HQ launches in Minecraft, with added ukulele of course!

Apologies to any French readers for butchering your beautiful language. Expect to see a lot more political campaigners turning to this space, they’re always very savvy in engaging new audiences.

Forget about the Rayban Meta frames or Apple glasses, Snapchat is playing 4D chess as they acquire NextMind - a neurotech startup that allows the wearer to control aspects of a computer - to embed into their future version of their AR Spectacles

This technology is crazy! Imagine wearing Snap spectacles, thinking ‘what way is the kebab shop’ and BAM! AR displays a map directing you to the shop to make a choice you’ll regret in the morning.

What we’ve learned📚

This wristband could be key to you feeling pain in the metaverse.

The Metaverse, now with added pain! You can step into a virtual tux, receive your $137k goodie bag and slap the comedian who makes a joke about your other half. This metaverse thing-a-majig sounds awesome

A Sony-backed start-up is working on delivering pain via wristbands that send electrical pulses through the arm muscles, with the tech able to deliver sensations like a pinch or holding a weight. “Feeling pain enables us to turn the metaverse world into a real [world], with increased feelings of presence and immersion”. Excellent.

The Nerd Corner🤓

Comic: In The Publisher's Kitchen

  • The encrypted signals from publishers allow Publishers to share encrypted first-party signals which include the Unified ID 2.0 with buy-side platforms of their choice via ad manager.

  • These signals include demographic data, contextual information, device ID, IP address, behavior data, interest data, or any one of the industry’s many alternative identifiers, such as UID2 or LiveRamp’s Ramp ID

  • This is a great step forward, following Google originally saying they’d never work with UID-esque identifiers.

  • I do not envy publishers having to figure out their tech stack to be compatible with all of these identifiers!

Best of the Net📱