
AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B - chauzer
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/att-appnexus/
======
JaimeThompson
And just this morning I received a text from AT&T that said, in part, "Your
privacy comes first, as always."

I wonder if they are getting their definition of privacy from the same place
they get their definition of unlimited?

~~~
gumby
I think they mean the first thing they target is your privacy.

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soared
There should be some decent commentary from industry people on r/adops:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquir...](https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquire_appnexus_for_16_billion/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_le...](https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_lesser_on_the_future_of_advertising/)

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asafira
Extra props for including "old." there.

~~~
coastal-fiesta
Why the dislike of the new interface?

~~~
jdhendrickson
How it looks, how it behaves, how it performs. If they implement it, I will
finally be able to break the addiction, and will probably sell off my 11 year
old account.

~~~
corrigible
What's the going rate on decade-plus accounts? I've got one with a catchy
handle, too.

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tehwebguy
This is incredibly disturbing, they need not inject a unique ID like
Verizon’s, they can now do it all on the backend.

~~~
rectang
When I went to start streaming the world cup, AT&T took the initiative to
"sign me in" to a third party (Fox) without asking for credentials or
permission.

They know who you are. They know everywhere you go. And they are happy to
spread what they know about you around.

~~~
aslkdjaslkdj1
Have you used your login for any other TV service? The OTT industry has
settled on a pretty broad single sign-on ecosystem. If you've logged into any
OTT service with your crendentials, you likely don't need to do it again for
any other service.

[https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-
up-46...](https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-up-46-single-
sign-adobe-says)

~~~
rectang
No. I've got Firefox configured to nuke almost everything on restart, plus I
run PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin. This is not me overlooking an existing
login.

(I also run a site-specific browsers via Chrome to isolate my Gmail login and
keep Google from knowing who I am, I have no Facebook login, etc. I'm not
serious enough to run a VPN or Tor, and my setup isn't enough to guard against
browser fingerprinting, but I'm reasonably paranoid.)

~~~
ghein
If they're your ISP they own you.

Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home
network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID.

But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away
from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but
no impediment to other.

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ocdtrekkie
On one side: Net neutrality is dead, so you can see where AT&T might see a
future for expanding their advertising business. But on the other side:
Between GDPR and the constant calls for the US to adopt something similar, the
default integration of ad blockers into more browsers, and the fact that
targeted advertising just... isn't all that effective, it seems like a poor
business to start investing in now.

~~~
tzahola
>default integration of ad blockers into more browsers

Good idea! The only way this could fail is if some huge advertising company
had created their own browser and became dominant on the market. We would be
so screwed! XD

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mathattack
Wow. Wow. Wow.

Part of me is terrified that someone who has all my details just bought a firm
that can trad on them. (It’s economic magic though - as if the Federal Reserve
bought a hedge fund)

But part of me says that when one dinosaur buys another, the end result is
rarely Excellence. I suspect that this will wind up a disaster and write-off.

~~~
phobosdeimos
Been blocking ads for years pretty thoroughly. Its a trillion $ industry that
might as well not exist really.

My advice: buy an unlocked Android phone. Throw DNS66 on it to block in app
ads. Use browsers that support ublock origin, I advise Fennec which is Firefox
for Android stripped of the Mozilla crap.

You are not a powerless victim, you have agency.

~~~
le-mark
How is Fennec on the battery life? I tried firefox on android several years
ago and uninstalled immediately due to battery consumption. Has that story
changed?

~~~
chadmeister
I'd recommend giving Firefox another shot. It's leaps and bounds ahead of
where it was on mobile more than a year ago.

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dangerlibrary
Well, since ISPs are now free to sell / monetize consumer traffic data [0],
this makes some sense. They are pretty desperate for ways to be something more
than a dumb pipe for other's content.

[0]
[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary)

~~~
trumped
they were always free to do that...

~~~
dangerlibrary
Absence (with the threat of regulation) is a very different state than an
explicit ban on regulation (via the CRA) and what amounts to a governmental
endorsement of their move into ad tech.

You're correct that the rules never went into effect, but they also had no
reason to invest in ad tech with the (increasingly probable) regulation
looming in the future.

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potatote
Last year, AT&T hired Brian Lesser, the former CEO of GroupM/WPP. They have
been planning to enter the digital marketing as a player for a while now.

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pasbesoin
More and more "vertical integration".

And, with the current FCC, I expect more forced "channeling" of
customers/users into said integration.

I wrote Congress regarding net neutrality. I got one response -- and that not
from my own representatives. And, despite my pointing this behavior out in my
original letter, it just continued to shill the ATT, Comcast, Verizon, et al.
talking points.

Right now, at home, on the connection Comcast just raised the monthly cost of
by circa 30% since the beginning of this year, I'm using a VPN to keep their
nose (and JS injection) out of my business.

I reiterate: We need a competing physical layer. One that we keep from getting
likewise co-opted.

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charleyma
Interesting answer to Verizon's acquisition of AOL + Yahoo, until all the
recent acquisitions I (naively) just assumed ISP's revenue was primary from
selling services (cable, internet, tv, data, etc) and reselling the data
somehow, but did not connect that they're all very much in adtech...

~~~
mcny
I am more surprised to see Oracle in adtech. I assumed ATT would want a piece
of the pie when I read about Verizon's supercookies. I think I still fail to
grasp the size of the ad tech/marketing industry. I know it is big but I think
it is bigger than I can comprehend.

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hughlang
This reminds me of all those times that Yahoo bought advertising networks and
tools.

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Azerb
So as someone getting AT&T Fiber this week, what VPNs should I look at using?

~~~
Rjevski
Make your own with a box in AWS or any other cloud provider running something
like Strongswan on Linux or iked on OpenBSD.

All the out of the box VPNs I've found have some shortcomings, either being
horribly insecure (PPTP, seriously?), overpriced, often abused (which means
their entire subnet is banned by pretty much everything) and the providers
sometimes seem shady (I want a VPN to escape cancer aka ads, not the
government - in this case I'd actually prefer something akin to an ISP
complying with local laws versus a "bulletproof" one who could very well be a
fly-by-night operation up to no good).

~~~
e1ven
I've found that a lot of typical residential traffic (Netflix) is blocked when
routing through datacenters.

I'd love to hear your experience.

~~~
ghein
Lots of gaming traffic is also banned. People use AWS for malicious purposes
(usually free tier) and then the IP gets recycled, eventually, to a legitimate
user.

Popular cloud hosts with a freemium option are a bad idea for personal vpn.

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lukego
Sounds like a bargain to acquihire pkhuong...
[https://www.pvk.ca/](https://www.pvk.ca/)

;-)

~~~
sanjayar
too late.

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a2tech
Well this is horrifying.

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paulsutter
Big congrats to Brian OKelley and Michael Rubenstein

~~~
hari_seldon_
With IPO rumors existing for at least 4 years and a price under $2B, is this a
good exit for the company’s leadership and employees? (Understanding that an
exit is better than nothing at all!)

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trumped
The unaccounted for $0.4B goes to bonuses for CEOs? /s

