Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: As few as 2 percent of New York City's previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself. The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city's short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a "black market" for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she's seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. "People are going underground," she says. New York's crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand. After the rule change, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market.

"I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way -- that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, 'If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,'" Chesky said during an event in September. "I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way -- it's probably a cautionary tale."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook's ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that "often change and may expire" -- deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her -- allegedly because advertisers used the platform's Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her -- as an older woman [...]. "As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services," Liapes' complaint alleged. [...]

Initially, a court agreed with Facebook's arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook's intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a "shocking conclusion," a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook's ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman -- who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is "a desire shared by almost no one" -- said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook's ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that "any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act." If the ruling is upheld, that could "have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem," Goldman warned. "The court's single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry," Goldman wrote in his blog. "Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?"

"The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting," Goldman told Ars. "It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion."

Adi Robertson reports via The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for "knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation" of children. It's one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional. Newsom's office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California's legislature in late September.

The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that "knowingly" leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines "aiding or abetting" to include "deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation." Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems. As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users.

An economist testified that Google made billions of dollars in extra ad revenue starting in 2017 — by making a secret change to its auction algorithm that bumped their revenues up 15%. Bloomberg reports: Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via "Project Momiji" — named for the wooden Japanese dolls that have a hidden space for friends to exchange secret messages. The shift sought "to raise the prices against the highest bidder," Whinston told Judge Amit Mehta in federal court in Washington.

Google's advertising auctions require the winner to pay only a penny more than the runner-up. In 2016, the company discovered that the runner-up had often bid only 80% of the winner's offer. To help eliminate that 20% between the runner-up and what the winner was willing to pay, Google gave the second-place bidder a built-in handicap to make their offer more competitive, Whinston said, citing internal emails and sealed testimony by Google finance executive Jerry Dischler earlier in the case...

About two-thirds, more than 60%, of Google's total revenue comes from search ads, Dischler said previously, amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020.
In 2021 Google was also accused of running "a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform," according to the New York Post (citing reporting by the Wall Street Journal). A Texas-led antitrust suit accused Google "of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report."

And the Post's article also mentioned "an alleged hush-hush deal in which Google allegedly guaranteed that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of advertising deals."

Meta is planning to lay off employees on Wednesday in the unit of its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division focused on creating custom silicon, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: Employees were informed of the layoffs in a post on Meta's internal discussion forum Workplace on Tuesday. The post said they would be notified about their status with the company by early Wednesday morning, one of the sources said. Reuters was not able to determine the extent of the cuts to the silicon unit, called Facebook Agile Silicon Team, or FAST, which has roughly 600 employees, according to the other source. The FAST unit is tasked with developing custom chips to power the augmented and virtual reality hardware produced by Meta's Reality Labs division. Meta currently makes a line of mixed reality headsets called Quest and smart glasses designed with Ray-Ban eyeglass maker EssilorLuxottica that can stream video and speak with wearers through a new artificial intelligence virtual assistant.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook -- but on desktop? That is what Meta wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don't agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators. The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent -- jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too. Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan -- which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads -- in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.

Anyone who has used H&R Block's tax return preparation services since 2015 "may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google's pocket," reports Gizmodo: That's according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies "jointly schemed" to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the tech companies which then used elements of the data to engage in targeted advertising.

Attorneys bringing the case forward claim the three companies' conduct amounts to a "pattern of racketeering activity" covered under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a tool typically reserved for organized crime. "H&R Block, Google, and Meta ignored data privacy laws, and passed information about people's financial lives around like candy," Brent Wisner, one of the attorneys bringing forward the complaint said.

The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California this week, stems from a bombshell Congressional report released earlier this year detailing the way multiple tax preparation firms, including H&R Block, "recklessly" shared the sensitive tax data of tens of millions of Americans without proper safeguards. At issue are the tax preparation firms' use of tracking "pixels" placed on their websites. These trackers, which the lawsuit refers to as "spy cams" would allegedly scan tax documents and reveal a variety of personal tax information, including a filer's name, filing status, federal taxes owed, address, and number of dependents. That data was then anonymized and used for targeted advertising and to train Meta's AI algorithms, the congressional report notes.
The attorneys argue that H&R Block, Meta, and Google "explicitly and intentionally" entered into an agreement to violate taxpayers' privacy rights for financial gain, according to the article. The suit seeks refunds and punitive damages.

The Guardian reports: Travel website Booking.com has left many hotel operators and other partners across the globe thousands of dollars out of pocket for months on end, blaming the lack of payment on a "technical issue". The issue is widespread in Thailand, Indonesia and Europe among hoteliers who are venting their frustrations in Facebook groups as rumours swirl about the cause of the failure to pay. Usually, if a customer makes a booking for a hotel through the website Booking.com and elects to pay upfront, the site takes the payment and passes it on to the hotel operator, minus a commission. Booking.com's partners have reported issues receiving payments since July, and in some cases months earlier. While Booking.com has continued taking payments from customers, the company has not always passed on the amount owed to hotel operators and others whom the Guardian has spoken to.
The article adds that last month Hungary's consumer watchdog agency "launched a probe into the company's failure to pay hotel operators in the country and raided Booking.com's local office, after local reporting on the issue."

In a statement to the Guardian, Booking.com acknowledged the "frustration" of customers affected by "an ongoing technical issue." They also said "the system errors that affected the payments have now been corrected," and that they had now processed the transactions of "most of" our partners. "We acknowledge that for some this has taken longer than it should have and continue to work urgently to finalise the rest of the transactions...."

In the company's August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,9272) for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether state laws that seek to regulate Facebook, TikTok, X and other social media platforms violate the Constitution. The justices will review laws enacted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas. While the details vary, both laws aim to prevent the social media companies from censoring users based on their viewpoints. The court's announcement, three days before the start of its new term, comes as the justices continue to grapple with how laws written at the dawn of the digital age, or earlier, apply to the online world.

The justices had already agreed to decide whether public officials can block critics from commenting on their social media accounts [...]. Separately, the high court also could consider a lower-court order limiting executive branch officials' communications with social media companies about controversial online posts. The new social media cases follow conflicting rulings by two appeals courts, one of which upheld the Texas law, while the other struck down Florida's statute. By a 5-4 vote, the justices kept the Texas law on hold while litigation over it continues.

Jude Karabus writes via The Register: Norway has told the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) it believes a countrywide ban on Meta harvesting user data to serve up advertising on Facebook and Instagram should be made permanent and extended across Europe. The Scandinavian country's Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, had been holding back Facebook parent Meta from scooping up data on its citizens with the threat of fines of one million Kroner (about $94,000) per day if it didn't comply.

In August, it said Meta hadn't been playing ball and started serving up the daily fines. However, the ban that resulted in these fines, put into place in July, expires on November 3 â" hence Norway's request for a "binding decision." The July order came after a Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling [PDF] earlier that month stating Meta's data processing operation was also hauling in protected data â" race and ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation etc. â" when it cast its behavioral ads net.

Norway is not a member of the EU but is part of the European single market, and the CJEU, as Europe's top court, has the job of making sure the application and interpretation of law within the market is compliant with European treaties (this part would apply to Norway) as well as ensuring that legislation adopted by the EU is applied the same way across all Member States. Datatilsynet's ruling said the central processing of that data by the American company was putting Meta in violation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. A spokesperson for Meta said it was "surprised" by the Norwegian authority's actions, "given that Meta has already committed to moving to the legal basis of consent for advertising in the EU/EEA."

It added: "We remain in active discussions with the relevant data protection authorities on this topic via our lead regulator in the EU, the Irish Data Protection Commission, and will have more to share in due course."

An anonymous reader shares a story: Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta -- and since then, he has been focused on building the "metaverse," a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta's Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion. But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn't given up on the metaverse -- he's just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend of the digital and the physical.

At Connect this year, Zuckerberg emphasized that the modern "real world" combines the physical world and the digital world still being built -- and that it all builds up to "this concept we call the metaverse." He added: "Pretty soon, I think we're going to be at a point where you're going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they'll feel just as present as everyone else. Or you'll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table. There will be people who are there physically and people who are there digitally as holograms, but also sitting around the table with you are going to be a bunch of AI guys who are embodied as holograms and are helping you get different stuff done too."

Meta announced a new pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses, capable of livestreaming to Facebook and Instagram and translating text. The glasses were announced at today's Connect event in Menlo Park alongside Meta's new Quest 3 headset. The Verge reports: The new glasses, which Meta just announced at its Connect launch event and which are up for preorder now and will be on sale October 17th starting at $299, have two primary purposes. The first is to replace your headphones: the smart glasses have a similar personal audio system like Amazon's Echo Frames and the Bose Tempo series, all of which play music but endeavor to make sure only you can hear it. With the new generation of glasses, Meta also upgraded the microphone system in a big way: the specs have five mics, including one in the nose bridge, which should make both your calls and voice commands much clearer. (The Stories only had one mic, and it kind of fell apart in loud or windy conditions.)

The other job of the glasses is as a camera. The smart glasses have small camera lenses on each right temple, just like the Stories -- but these cameras take 12-megapixel photos and 1080p videos, both big upgrades from the previous generation. You can store roughly 500 photos and 100 30-second videos (that's the maximum length the glasses allow) before you fill up the 32GB of internal storage, and everything syncs through the Meta View app. The app also lets you quickly share anything you capture to Meta's many, many sharing platforms.

In addition to taking photos and videos on the camera, you can also now start a livestream to Facebook or Instagram with just a couple of taps on the stem of the glasses. When you're recording, a white light around the lens pulses to indicate you're recording.

Indonesia said it will bar social media companies from allowing transactions and doubling as e-commerce platforms -- all to prevent misuse of public data. "This means that users in Indonesia cannot buy or sell products and services on TikTok and Facebook," reports CNBC. From the report: In a media conference Monday, Minister of Trade Zulkifli Hasan said that "the connection [between social media and e-commerce] must be separated so that the algorithm is not all controlled" and this "prevents the use of personal data" for business purposes. Indonesia also said it would also regulate which overseas goods can be sold, adding these products would receive the same treatment as offline domestic goods. The move comes as foreign goods become increasingly available in Indonesia through social media platforms. "Social commerce was born to solve a real world problem for local traditional small sellers, by matching them with local creators who can help drive traffic to their online shops," a TikTok spokesperson said in response to the move.

"While we respect local laws and regulations, we hope that the regulations take into account its impact on the livelihoods of more than 6 million sellers and close to 7 million affiliate creators who use TikTok Shop."

The next-generation of Meta Quest hardware is here, and Meta announced a bunch of software news alongside the Quest 3 VR headset hardware reveal at its Connect conference. One such announcement was the debut of Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service on Meta Quest 3, which is actually a huge boon for fans of the Facebook owner's mixed reality gear. From a report: The Xbox Cloud Gaming implementation in Quest resembles a lot of how Apple showed its own vision for mixed reality with the Vision Pro headset: It's primarily a virtual screen that can float in either a virtual or mixed reality space, which appears to be reposition-able and resizable, but which basically works exactly as you'd expect an Xbox game to work with a large TV. This is a key acknowledgement on the part of Meta that while immersive, native gaming is undoubtedly a draw for users, so too is a more traditional gaming experience that basically just benefits from taking place in your own private face-mounted theater.

Meta introduced its latest lineup of head-worn devices, staking fresh claim to the virtual- and augmented-reality industry just ahead of Apple pushing into the market. From a report: The company officially unveiled the Quest 3 headset on Wednesday, raising the price by $200 to $500, at its annual Connect developers conference. It also introduced second-generation smart glasses that it developed with luxury sunglass maker Ray-Ban. The Quest 3, which was previewed by Meta earlier this year after Bloomberg published a hands-on review of the device, offers improved performance over the Quest 2 from 2020. It also marks a pivot from VR to mixed reality, which melds virtual and augmented reality.

It's a high-stakes moment for Meta's hardware business. Though the company has dominated VR goggles for years, Apple is poised to release its Vision Pro headset in the coming months, setting up a showdown. Like the Quest 3, the Vision Pro is a mixed-reality headset -- though one with exclusive Apple technology and content. The Vision Pro will have Apple's marketing muscle behind it, but also a much higher price: $3,499. In addition to the competitive pressure, Meta also has struggled to sell consumers on the metaverse -- a collection of interlocking online worlds that make use of its headsets.

The Philips Hue ecosystem of home automation devices is "collapsing into stupidity," writes Rachel Kroll, veteran sysadmin and former production engineer at Facebook. "Unfortunately, the idiot C-suite phenomenon has happened here too, and they have been slowly walking down the road to full-on enshittification." From her blog post: I figured something was up a few years ago when their iOS app would block entry until you pushed an upgrade to the hub box. That kind of behavior would never fly with any product team that gives a damn about their users -- want to control something, so you start up the app? Forget it, we are making you placate us first! How is that user-focused, you ask? It isn't.

Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff. But that's just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it's getting worse.

It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage "cloud" "integration" involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you. If you have just the lights and smart outlets, Kroll recommends deleting the units from the Hue Hub and adding them to an IKEA Dirigera hub. "It'll run them just fine, and will also export them to HomeKit so that much will keep working as well." That said, it's not a perfect solution. You will lose motion sensor data, the light level, the temperature of that room, and the ability to set custom behaviors with those buttons.

"Also, there's no guarantee that IKEA won't hop on the train to sketchville and start screwing over their users as well," adds Kroll.

What has your experience been with the Philips Hue ecosystem? Do you have any alternatives you recommend?

"As a result of the move to working from home, Meta has walked away from one of its offices in London at the cost of 149 million pounds," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. The London Evening Standard reports: Meta paid the FTSE 250 developer 149 million pounds on Monday in order to break the lease on the building, 1 Triton Square. The tech firm, which also owns Instagram, let the space from 2021 following a refurbishment but never moved into the space. Meta has three open London sites including a neighbouring building in Regent's Place, near Warren Street in central London.

Analysts at BNP Paribas Exane claimed Meta has another 18 years on its lease at the site. British Land said it will receive the one-off payment to end the lease but the agreement would also reduce its earnings per share by 0.6% over the six months to next March.

Emma Roth reporting via The Verge: Facebook can be sued over allegations that its advertising algorithm is discriminatory, a California state court of appeals ruled last week. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020, which accused the company of not showing insurance ads to women and older people in violation of civil rights laws. The case centers around Samantha Liapes, a 48-year-old woman who turned to Facebook to find an insurance provider. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook's ad delivery system didn't show Liapes ads for insurance due to her age and gender.

In a September 21st ruling, the appeals court reversed a previous decision that said Section 230 (which protects online platforms from legal liability if users post illegal content) shields Facebook from accountability. The appeals court concluded that the case "adequately" alleges that Facebook "knew insurance advertisers intentionally targeted its ads based on users' age and gender" in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act. It also found significant similarities between Facebook's ad platform and Roommates.com, a service that exceeded the protections of Section 230 by including dropdown menus with options that allowed for discrimination. "There is little difference with Facebook's ad tools" and their targeting capabilities, the court concluded. "Facebook does not merely proliferate and disseminate content as a publisher ... it creates, shapes, or develops content" with the tools.

70 million Americans live in a county without a newspaper, according to a 2022 report cited in this editorial by the Washington Post's editorial board"

Who's to blame? The internet, mostly. Whereas deep-pocketed advertisers formerly relied on newspapers to reach their customers, they took to the audience-targeting capabilities of Facebook or Google. Web-based marketplaces also siphoned newspapers' once-robust revenue from classified ads.
But the Post emphasizes one positive new development: "a large pile of cash." In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward... The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.

The even bigger imperative, however, is to elevate local news on the philanthropic food chain so that national and hometown funders prioritize this pivotal American institution. Failure on this front places more pressure on public policy solutions, and government activism mixes poorly with independent journalism...

One of the goals for Press Forward, accordingly, is building out the infrastructure — "from legal support to membership programs" — relied upon by local news providers to deliver their product. Jim Brady, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, says it's easier than ever for news entrepreneurs to launch a local site because they can plug into existing technologies hammered out by their predecessors — and there's more development work still to fund on this front.

So where to go from here? Local philanthropic interests across the country could take a cue from the Press Forward partners and invest in the news organizations down the street.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A few lucky WhatsApp beta testers got a surprising treat this week: the company appears to be testing a version of its iOS app that is also optimized for the iPad. As first spotted by WABetaInfo, version 23.19.1.71 of WhatsApp's TestFlight app includes the new iPad app as well. From what we can see in screenshots, the iPad app works exactly like you'd expect. You connect to it by scanning a QR code the same way you'd link your account to any other device. You'll see a list of your conversations on the left and your current chat on the right. It's pretty much the iOS app, but instead of seeing one pane at a time, you see both. It almost makes you wonder what took so long, especially when WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said all the way back in January of 2022 that "we'd love to do it."