Hey, fancy seeing you here – haven’t seen you since last year… Okay, dad jokes aside, we hope you had a wonderful holiday season and we wish you a fruitful 2024 ahead. After a food-fueled break, we are ready to jump back in the saddle with Sunday Rundown #101 🙂
Meta to remove more detailed targeting options for ad campaigns
An important note for Facebook advertisers, with Meta announcing that it will be removing and/or consolidating some of its detailed ad targeting options. This is either because they are not widely used, are too granular, or they relate to topics that “people may perceive as sensitive.”
“Starting January 15, 2024, we’re removing or consolidating some detailed targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive. Existing ad sets with impacted targeting options will continue to run until March 18 2024, but will require you to update your targeting selections. After this date, we will stop delivering ads to the discontinued detailed targeting options, and impacted ad sets may be paused.”
As explained by Meta
Meta has not provided specific details of the categories they are scrapping. Therefore, it is hard to measure the potential impact and the full scope of the changes. But it is another step away from manual, granular ad targeting, which, inevitably, can be used for discriminatory targeting, in various ways.
Podcasting is in its YouTube era
YouTube is making good on its promise to support RSS feeds. In a blog post and video published three days ago, the company provided instructions for podcasters on how to connect their RSS feeds to YouTube Studio. It is a significant step in solidifying YouTube’s place as the top destination for podcasts.
While most other platforms simply make an RSS feed available for listeners, YouTube’s new system ingests episodes from an RSS feed and turns them into YouTube videos. Podcasters can then opt into YouTube’s ads and have access to the streamer’s sophisticated analytics.Â
GenAI could make KYC effectively useless
KYC, or “know your customer,” is a process that helps financial institutions, fintech startups and banks verify the identity of their customers. Not uncommonly, KYC authentication involves “ID images,” or cross-checked selfies used to confirm a person is who they say they are. Wise, Revolut and cryptocurrency platforms Gemini and LiteBit are among those relying on ID images for security onboarding. But generative AI could sow doubt into these checks.
Viral posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit show how leveraging open source and off-the-shelf software, an attacker could download a selfie of a person, edit it with generative AI tools and use the manipulated ID image to pass a KYC test. There is no evidence that GenAI tools have been used to fool a real KYC system — yet. But the ease with which relatively convincing deepfaked ID images is cause for alarm.
Bonus links
- Try these apps to reach your New Year’s resolutions in 2024
- From ChatGPT to Google Bard: how AI is rewriting the internet
- YouTube Adds Simplified Tools To Edit Long Form Clips Into Shorts
- Third-party data loss could be problematic for SMBs: Here’s what the numbers say
Thank you for taking the time to read our Sunday Rundown #101. If you have a story that you want to see in this series, reply to us below or contact us.