The latest news and views for the Supply-Side and DSP Community.

Malware in Ad-Based Images Targets Mac Users

A massive adware campaign has so far impacted up to a million Mac users, using a tricky steganography technique to hide malware in image files. (Threat Post)

Google and Ad Industry Accused of “Massive” Abuse of Intimate Personal Data

Last September, a coalition of privacy activists and browser-makers targeted Google and the advertising technology industry with complaints about “a massive and ongoing data breach that affects virtually every user on the web”. Now they’ve released new evidence showing this data includes information about people’s ethnicity, disabilities, sexual orientation and more. (Fortune)

Programmatic Ad Data Helps Predict Retail Store Closures

Data scientists from Dstillery used data from search, proprietary programmatic, and third-party longitude and latitude to help predict Gap store closures. The researchers built a data model similar to what is typically used to predict advertising conversions to analyze the relationship between consumers and stores. (MediaPost)

Ghost Sites, Domain Spoofing, Fake Apps: A Guide to Knowing Your Ad Fraud

Cracking down on digital ad fraud may seem like a hopeless and expensive game of whack-a-mole, but there are ways marketers and publishers can arm themselves better to fight it. Here's a breakdown of all forms of ad fraud. (Digiday)

Why British Gas Ditched Google’s Ad Server

Google, which has a dominant share of the ad server market, announced last May that it would remove the Google ID from its ad-server log files, thus prohibiting marketers from tracking or measuring Google audiences with external technology. This was the impetus for some advertisers to reconsider their ad server. (AdExchanger)