March 19, 2024

New Study Analyzing Political Advertising on Facebook, Google, and TikTok

By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective voters through digital advertising. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok will play an important role in distributing that content. But our new study […]

Holding Purveyors of “Dark Patterns” for Online Travel Bookings Accountable

Last week, my former colleagues at the New York Attorney General’s Office (NYAG), scored a $2.6 million settlement with Fareportal – a large online travel agency that used deceptive practices, known as “dark patterns,” to manipulate consumers to book online travel. The investigation exposes how Fareportal, which operates under several brands, including CheapOair and OneTravel […]

When Terms of Service limit disclosure of affiliate marketing

By Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan and Marshini Chetty In a recent paper, we analyzed affiliate marketing on YouTube and Pinterest. We found that on both platforms, only about 10% of all content with affiliate links is disclosed to users as required by the FTC’s endorsement guidelines. One way to improve the situation is for affiliate […]

Refining the Concept of a Nutritional Label for Data and Models

By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drexel University)  and Bill Howe (Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington) In August 2016,  Julia Stoyanovich and Ellen P. Goodman spoke in this forum about the importance of bringing interpretability to the algorithmic transparency debate.  They focused on algorithmic rankers, discussed the harms […]

Is affiliate marketing disclosed to consumers on social media?

By Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan and Marshini Chetty YouTube has millions of videos similar in spirit to this one: The video reviews Blue Apron—an online grocery service—describing how it is efficient and cheaper than buying groceries at the store. The description of the video has a link to Blue Apron which gets you a $30 […]