Following on from Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and as part of his testimony, Facebook has revealed all (or most) of the many ways that it collects data on its users. While some of the data it collects about you, (like how much time you [...]
In the first ever public demonstration of an AI technology that IBM has been working on for the last 5 years, last week saw the tech giant's "Project Debater" pit their artificial intelligence against two human debaters on the topics of government-subsidised space exploration, and telemedicine. Although the computer had never studied the topics, it [...]
A recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has revealed social media in general, and Facebook in particular, is losing ground as a source for news as more people lose trust in social media for hard news. According to a survey of 74,000 people across 37 countries, the use of social [...]
Yesterday, almost 18 years after launching their AdWords platform to allow businesses to advertise in their search engine results, Google announced that they will be re-branding their advertising products / solutions. According to the post on the Analytics blog, these new, "simpler" brands and solutions will help advertisers and publishers choose the right solutions to [...]
Earlier this year, Google announced that as part of their "Mobile First" drive, and their on-going commitment to providing answers to search queries as fast as possible, they will, as of July this year, be treating website page loading speed as a ranking factor on mobile searches. Speed has already been a ranking factor for [...]
In the wake of recent scandals about social media and its impact in political campaigns and elections, two of the worlds largest social media companies have, almost at the same time, announced new rules and guidelines for the promotion of politically related advertising. Full Disclosure Both Twitter and Facebook came under fire for their role [...]
With around 40,000 searches being processed every second by Google, the internet giant can provide some interesting insights into the everyday lives of the people who use it. They use this data to help them understand the intent of users, and improve the user experience by providing relevant information as quickly as possible. Every year, [...]
Earlier this month, Google Analytics users received an email telling them that, as a result of the new European General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into effect at the end of May, they will no longer be retaining Analytics data indefinitely. Instead, they have made it possible for users to set their own data retention [...]
The Protection Of Personal Information Act (No 4 of 2013) has been hovering in the background for quite some time already. Its intention is to bring the practices governing data collection and direct marketing in South Africa into line with European standards and guidelines governing these issues, and although the Act was first published in [...]
Google Analytics was launched in 2005, and was called Urchin. Since then, it's seen numerous changes and massive growth. The standard Google Analytics is available fee of charge from Google, and is also offered in two additional versions: the subscription based Google Analytics 360, (previously Google Analytics Premium), targeted at enterprise users, and Google Analytics [...]
