Analysis of skin tones in beauty ads on Instagram

For Quartz, Amanda Shendruk and Marc Bain analyzed skin tones that appeared in beauty and fashion ads on Instagram. The graphics use Blackout Tuesday on June 2, 2020, when many brands vowed to improve diversity to better reflect the world, as a point of comparison. Using median skin color as the main metric, some companies shifted more than others.

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Blacklight, a tool to see how the websites you visit are tracking you

Companies are tracking what you do online. You know this. But it can be a challenge to know the extent, because the methods are hidden on purpose. So The Markup built Blacklight:

To investigate the pervasiveness of online tracking, The Markup spent 18 months building a one-of-a-kind free public tool that can be used to inspect websites for potential privacy violations in real time. Blacklight reveals the trackers loading on any site—including methods created to thwart privacy-protection tools or watch your every scroll and click.

We scanned more than 80,000 of the world’s most popular websites with Blacklight and found more than 5,000 were “fingerprinting” users, identifying them even if they block third-party cookies.

We also found more than 12,000 websites loaded scripts that watch and record all user interactions on a page—including scrolls and mouse movements. It’s called “session recording” and we found a higher prevalence of it than researchers had documented before.

Try it out here. Just enter a URL, and you’ll see a real-time count of the ad trackers, third-party cookies, cookie evaders, and keystroke recorders on any given site.

This is why I got rid of Google Analytics, social media widgets, and ad-serving snippets on FD years ago.

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Bloomberg ad spending, relative to other candidates’

Mike Bloomberg’s ad spending might not be that much relative to his own net worth, but compared to other candidates’ spending, it’s a whole lot of money. The Washington Post puts the spending into perspective with a long scroller. Each rectangle represents $100k, and there are “mile markers” along the way to keep you anchored on the scale.

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