Digital News 11 April 2011
Ad industry moves forward on self-regulation of targeting
A self-regulatory initiative for behavioural advertising will launch next week in an effort to protect the £4bn online ad industry from an implementation of EU law that could decimate it.
The self-regulatory framework – developed by a broad coalition of advertising, marketing and online businesses including the IAB, the World Federation of Advertisers, the European Advertising Standards Alliance, the Direct Marketing Association and ISBA – has gained signatures from the top ten UK ad networks, with more to follow including AdPepper, Jemm Media and Unanimis.
It aims to meet the notion of user consent through transparency and control. Users receiving behaviourally targeted and retargeted ads will be alerted by a privacy icon which, when clicked on, gives information on what behavioural targeting is, how the practice is achieved, and what users can do to opt out of receiving such ads through a central website, Your Online Choices.
Facebook shares green data centre technology
Facebook has announced that it will share the design secrets behind its new energy-efficient data centre with rival companies.
The social network’s facility in Prineville, Oregon is said to use 38% less power than existing centres. It hopes, by making the innovations public, to cut the amount of electricity the industry consumes. Despite Facebook’s advances, some environmental groups have criticised the firm over its green credentials.
Working under the title Open Compute Project, Facebook will release specifications and mechanical drawings of the building and its servers. Data centres use vast amounts of electricity to run their computer equipment and also to keep it cool.
Until now, Facebook has paid to lease its servers and storage space from other companies. The Prineville plant is its first custom-built facility and cost $188m (£117m). Much has been made of its environmentally friendly specifications. Among the innovations, the centre make extensive use of outside air, as opposed to air conditioning, to cool the rows of servers.
The machines themselves are also specially designed to maximise the new cooling system. “The best way to reduce CO2 and improve the environment is to cut energy consumption and that is what we are doing,” said Mr Heiliger. Facebook has stripped out nonessential parts, paint, logos and stickers - saving, it claims, more than 6 pounds of materials per server. Facebook claims that, by sharing its design innovations, the wider web economy will benefit, especially small start-up companies.
Facebook claimed that if one quarter of US data centres used specifications released by the Open Compute Project, the energy saved could power more than 160,000 homes.
Does Italy Really Want Search Engines? Recent Legal Rulings Suggest Not
Google and Yahoo have felt the sting of the Italian courts recently and the numerous problems the engines seem to be having in the country almost suggests search engines are not welcome. Or maybe the search engines will just decide the effort is not worth the return and filter Italy like Google did to the search results in China.
Google was found liable for defamation of a person from their autocomplete - which is a reflection of what people are searching for, but as the case stated, Google had already filtered the autocomplete for copyright terms - so the court determined they could filter these too.
Meanwhile, Yahoo was found guilty of distributing a movie without authorization by linking to the site that was doing the distribution. “As for the reasoning behind the decision, it seems to focus on a stretch of an interpretation of the EU’s E-Commerce Directive, which indicates that a “caching provider” has to block links to content once notified that it’s infringing.
Previously, three Google executives were found guilty of privacy violations for not taking down a video from YouTube that made derogatory statements about an autistic child.
The Italian courts seem to think that every engine is responsible for vetting each entry as they are indexed. This is not a mechanical tweak - the type of control the Italian government requires engines to observe would mean a lot of man hours and realistically would make the process untenable.
